Quotes About Experience

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired

Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.

I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.

It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it.

Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. Nietzsche

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully ) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

Certainly travelers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare colored butterfly, often sighted, but rarely conclusively identified.

Romantik dönem boyuncaruhun hisle baÄŸdaÅŸt?r?ld???ndan bahsetmiÅŸtik; ancak ÅŸunu söylemekte yarar var ki çok k?sa bir süre sonra his;zevkleri ya da mutluluklar? deÄŸil de ac?lar? hissetmekle özdeÅŸlerÅŸtirilir oldu.Bir ÅŸeyleri derinden yaÅŸamak; mutlu olmak;duÅŸta ?sl?k çalmak ya da bahçede ÅŸark? söylemek anlam?na gelmiyordu: Ruhu olan insan ac?lara duyarl? insan demekti art?k.

But the museum is only a prelude to a life well lived.

We require such 'sensuous' arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material.

Just as a childhood can be released from the odour of a washing powder or cup of tea, an entire culture can spring from the angles of a few lines.

Ancak ac?yla tan???nca gözümüzde deÄŸer kazan?r güzel ÅŸeyler. Belki biraz garip ama ac?yla tan???kl?k, mimariyi takdir edebilme yetisinin ön koÅŸuludur. Binalar?n güzelliÄŸinden etkilenebilmek için her ÅŸeyden önce biraz ac? çekmiÅŸ olmam?z gerekir.

Every skillful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses - and in so doing prompts us to find and savour those in the world around us.

the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience'.