Quotes About Experience

I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness.

What exactly did we learn in kindergarten? Nothing we wouldn't have learned if we;d stayed home. Okay, we learned that sometimes, by the time you get to the bathroom, it's too late.

The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience.

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

These are the outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power: What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature?

Desde el nacimiento hasta la muerte, de lunes a lunes, de la mañana a la noche: todas las actividades están rutinizadas y prefabricadas. ¿Cómo puede un hombre preso en esa red de actividades rutinarias recordar que es un hombre, un individuo único, al que sólo le ha sido otorgada una única oportunidad de vivir, con esperanzas y desilusiones, con dolor y temor, con el anhelo de amar y el miedo a la nada y a la separatidad?

One can experience a situation of the past with the same freshness as if it occurred in the here and now; that is, one can re-create the past, bring it to life (resurrect the dead, symbolically speaking). To the extent that one does so, the past ceases to be the past; it is the here and now.

In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.

Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irrational faith I understand the belief (in a person or an idea) which is based on one's submission to irrational authority. In contrast, rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one's own experience of thought or feeling.

Well-being means, finally, to drop one's Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one's self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.

Worte sind Gefäße, die wir mit Erlebnissen füllen, doch diese quellen über das Gefäß hinaus.

BaÅŸkalar?n?n deÄŸiÅŸebileceÄŸine inanç duymam için benim deÄŸiÅŸme deneyimini yaÅŸam?? olmam gerekir.

Man is not a subject opposing the world in order to transform it; he is in the world making his being in the world the occasion for constant self-transformation

The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room—and no need—for knowledge about God.

In the experience of love lies the only answer to being human, lies sanity.

Ich war kein Lehrer, sondern ein Lerner. Ich wollte nicht lehren, sondern lernen. Ich hatte Lehrer werden wollen, um möglichst lange ein Schüler bleiben zu können. Ich wollte Neues, immer wieder Neues aufnehmen und um keinen Preis Altes, immer wieder Altes weitergeben. Ich war hungrig, ich war kein Bäcker. Ich war wissensdurstig, ich war kein Schankwirt.

It is always the same. Whether you are walking or going by train, the way always seems shorter the second time than the first. (And that is true of distances that are not to be measured in miles and yards.)

Um die Hauptsache nicht zu vergessen, bitte ich euch in dieser hoffentlich unverlierbaren Stunde: Vergesst eure Jugend nicht! Das klingt jetzt, wo ihr noch Kinder seid, recht überflüssig. Aber es ist nicht überflüssig. Glaubt es uns! Wir sind älter geworden und trotzdem jung geblieben. Wir wissen Bescheid, wir beiden!

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

I don't want to get old." "You won't get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels." "No. When one no longer loves.

But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

Regret is the most useless thing in the world. One cannot recall anything. And one cannot rectify anything. Otherwise we would all be saints. Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Wir sind verlassen wie Kinder und erfahren wie alte Leute, wir sind roh und traurig und oberflächlich - ich glaube, wir sind verloren.