Quotes About Experience

I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.

When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

People should go to the works and experience them. Because just having an idea or picture in mind is absolutely not the experience that's necessary. Even just landing in Albuquerque or Salt Lake City or Las Vegas was immediately part of the experience. And then you'd get in a car from the airport and take these very long trips - in Michael Heizer's case, it was three hours by car to get to his work. And then there's walking around and into the piece and seeing it from different angles. The kinetic experience of being a part of it physically was very important for me.

The experience curve says that your costs should probably decline by 15% or 20% with every doubling in your experience making a product, approximately how many of them you turn out. It also says that if you have the biggest market share, meaning the most experience of anybody in your competitive set, you should have the lowest costs, and the resultant capability to underprice your competitors, maybe forever. The abiding lesson of the experience curve is that companies need to discipline themselves to keep reducing their costs, year in, year out, if they are to remain competitive.

One thing I really hate is experience. Experience for me doesn't work. Everybody's talking about experience this, experience that.

The only way to experience an experience is to experience it

When we see that we are not made up by the other's experience, we then have the capacity not to take responsibility for what is now genuinely and for the first time not ours. And as a result, we can get just as close to the other's experience (even the other's experience of how dissapointing, enraging, or disapprovable we are!) without any need to react defensively to it or be guiltily compliant with it.

Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

You can't really take a vinyl record player on a plane so you're not going to have the same experience, but if you walk yourself away and allow yourself to experience these different moments with music, you're so much richer in experience for that. That's what I believe.

Any attempt to capture the direct experience of the nature of mind in words is impossible. The best that can be said is that it is immeasurably peaceful and, once stabilized through repeated experience, virtually unshakable. It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional and mental states-even those that might ordinarily be labeled as unpleasant.

My greatest sense comes from the experience of performing in the movie. When I have a great experience, that becomes a perfect movie. If it makes a nickel, it's still perfect. The same is true with a movie that's a bad experience. If it makes a bejillion dollars, I will hate it till the end of time.

When anarchists are having a debate, they're having a debate about tactics, 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?' The question isn't 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?', the primary question is how do you build confidence among the masses of people who experience hierarchies, who experience exploitation, who experience oppression.

What's recommended is that if you have a good experience, don't get too excited. And if you have a bad experience, don't mistake it for a serious deviation or a sidetrack that you have to find your way back from. If you have a bad experience, just continue practicing as you were. In other words, whatever happens, just keep looking at your mind.

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This in certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge.

It is a fact beyond question that there are two kinds of Christian experience, one of which is an experience of bondage, and the other an experience of liberty.

... negative feelings are not true feelings at all; rather, they are your thoughts about something, based always on the previous experience of yourself and others. You will not find Truth in your past data, only past data that is based on other past data that is based on other past data, and so forth. Forget your "past experience" and look directly at the experience you are having. Right Here, Right Now. There is your Truth.

Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.

The experience of yoga is unspeakable. It's the experience of samadhi. It's the experience of connectedness, of oneness, boundlessness, merging with God consciousness... even if it's just for an instant.

The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.

I have a perhaps naive point of view informed by my own kind of snowflake-in-the-unique-sense rather than the political sense, personal story. I mean I feel like my experiences are so hard to map onto any kind of generalized identity. For example, I'm a black person, but I come from a very particular black experience which is not unlike the experience of the Barack Obama. I have an African mother and a white father and I feel like I have a different experience of being a black person as a result of that identity than someone who is from the descendants of slaves.

I have a lot more writing experience than Paul Dano has, so to be able to put that experience to use in exercising his vision was almost an acting exercise: How would I write if I were Paul? When I look at it, it feels so completely his, but it's also mine.

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Each and every component that makes up your life experience is drawn to you by the powerful Law of Attraction's response to the thoughts you think and the story you tell about your life. Your money and financial assets; your body's state of wellness, clarity, flexibility, size, and shape; your work environment, how you are treated, work satisfaction, and rewards - indeed, the very happiness of your life experience in general - is all happening because of the story that you tell.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I find it interesting that people often seem to believe that authors of realistic fiction are directly translating their personal experiences into their work. The fact is that telling a story is a transformative experience. There is rarely a one-to-one translation onto the page unless you're writing memoir, and even then, memory is unreliable. I think that the best books feel emotionally true, and that truth has to be rooted in real-world experience.

You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.

Realization is not knowledge about the universe, but the living experience of the nature of the universe. Until we have such living experience, we remain dependent on examples, and subject to their limits.

When I give a concert, I know they're not going to hear everything; there might be a lot going on. My individual perceptual and cognitive path through the music is just that: one path through music. My experience will be probably at some level different from other people's, and that multiplicity of experience has to be supported by the music. I might just focus on the cowbell the whole time - maybe I have a fever for more cowbell!

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage

I don't want to sound like a heroic woman or to seem full of myself, but I do have a core of trust that I'll figure things out and find my way. And if whatever I try is not a good experience, even that is a good experience. If something turns out lousy, it's interesting.

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.

Since we have been out of balance so heavily towards the male, it is going to be the feminine energy which will now move into a place of enormous influence and enormous impact, as that energy creates a confluence of all the energies surrounding our experience of deities, of the Tao of God, and our expression of that experience in our daily lives.

I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment – if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes – everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

Trans voices are really underrepresented, and trans stories are really underrepresented, and when they are presented, they're often reductive. I was interested in putting a trans person and a trans narrative on stage that didn't fall into cliché, that thought a bit more deeply about the experience of being trans, and how those issues tie into things that we all experience. How we tell the story of our lives, versus what might have actually happened, and how we communicate to our former selves. All of those questions were really interesting to me.

I have the lived experience of a Black man in America, also raising Black kids, but I also have the lived experience of being a responsible person who is responsible for the resourcing and the outfitting of a law enforcement agency.

In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.

I don't know if you're ever prepared for public scrutiny. I don't know if you can even mentally prepare yourself for it. But it is part of the job. It's maybe not the most pleasant part but I get to experience so many other things that I shouldn't be able to experience. So, that's the trade-off.

I've never smoked crack. I've never done most things, drug-wise. But I assume that the experience I had watching Lost is the experience that crack addicts have smoking crack.

Love is the experience that others are not others. Beauty is the experience that objects are not objects.

What is the secret of success? Right decisions. How do you make right decisions? Experience. How do you gain experience? Wrong decisions.

You see something for the first time, you experience something for the first time, you feel something for the first time, it's much harder. I think that it's painful, but at the same time I think it should be the way to experience the world.