Experience Quotes

"Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives."

"The moment we realize that the only things we can intelligibly value are actual and potential changes in the experience of conscious beings, we can think about a landscape of such changes - where the peaks correspond to the greatest possible well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering."

"If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before."

"A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood."

"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works."

"I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers."

"The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes."

"There's something about being in front of a live audience that's fun. It's a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can't get it anywhere else. And I've been doing it since I was 23, so it's part of my being - it's part of my fabric as a person."

"The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse."

"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

"The profoundly 'atomic' character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead."

"You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of 'then' and 'maybe,' but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience."

"You experience your soul each time you sense yourself as more than a mind and body, your life as meaningful, or you feel that you have gifts to give and you long to give them."

"The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom."

"When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty."

"I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on."

"But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience."

"Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see."

"Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience."

"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."

"'Vikings' has been a great experience. You get so many great friends. And I love Ireland and the people and crew. It's a beautiful place."

"We can not continue to allow this over reliance on government to replace the cornerstone institution that has made the American experience possible."

"Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so."

"People think that their world will get smaller as they get older. My experience is just the opposite. Your senses become more acute. You start to blossom."

"The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it."

"Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you've got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it's a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way."

"Karma is experience, and experience creates memory, and memory creates imagination and desire, and desire creates karma again. If I buy a cup of coffee, that's karma. I now have that memory that might give me the potential desire for having cappuccino, and I walk into Starbucks, and there's karma all over again."

"How do people relate to movies now, when they're on portable devices or streaming them? It's not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed."

"In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say."

"If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires."

"The only source of knowledge is experience."