Quotes about experiment
page 2

“Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

On Becoming a Person (1961)
Source: page 23-24

God, Truth, Way, Error

“The agreement of this law with nature will be better seen by the repetition of experiments than by a long explanation.”

Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) Danish physicist and chemist

Relating his discovery of the magnetic effect of an electric current, in "Experiments on the Effect of a Current of Electricity on the Magnetic Needle", Annals of Philosophy 1820, vol. 16, pp. 273-277.

Law, Nature

“The power of the pen is far greater than those people suppose who have not proved it by experience.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book The Decameron

Le forze della penna sono troppo maggiori che coloro non estimano che quelle con conoscimento provato non hanno.
Eighth Day, Seventh Story
The Decameron (c. 1350)

People

“As the Libyan experience has shown, sadly, a military scenario is possible. We won’t allow any more such disingenuous interpretations. We will see to it that no resolution is open to interpretation like the one on Libya.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

Moscow to Block Any Bid for Force Against Iran, October 2012 http://en.rian.ru/russia/20121023/176857678.html

“Military history, especially Russian, is being studied poorly. We have a lot of unfair ridiculing of the old army despite the fact that we had such notable tsarist army generals as Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bagration who will always remain in the minds of the people as great Russian military leaders and who are revered in the Red Army as a legacy of the finest military traditions of the Russian soldier. There exists a harmful cult of Civil War heroes, while previous Russian military achievements are ignored. All of this leads to the ignoring of concrete historical experience despite the fact that history is the best teacher.”

Lev Mekhlis (1889–1953) Soviet politician

Mekhlis in 1940. Quoted in The People Need a Tsar: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941, by D. L. Brandenberger & A. M. Dubrovsky, 1998

War, People, History, Study

“It’s something very few actors really get to experience. When you’re a character actor or voiceover guy, it’s job to job. You’re like a migrant worker, almost. The longevity [of “SpongeBob”] is an unbelievable statistical anomaly. It’s like, I didn’t buy that many lottery tickets and I won the lottery. It’s a totally random, harmonic convergence of people you met and your agent getting you an audition. Actors have so little control over their own lives; it’s nice to have something you’re not in control of that’s actually positive. There was a point when “SpongeBob” was cancelled after the first few seasons and the first movie. We went to a wrap party that I thought was the season wrap party but was the series wrap party. Nobody knew. So I already feel like I dodged a bullet.”

Tom Kenny (1962) American actor

Interview: Tom Kenny talks voicing SpongeBob Squarepants and 'Mr. Show' http://www.metro.us/entertainment/interview-tom-kenny-talks-voicing-spongebob-squarepants-and-mr-show/zsJoba---UspN3mmMXb2BE (February 2, 2015)

People, Guy, Feeling, Season

“Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

Opus Majus, c. 1267
Source: Robert Belle Burke (2002) The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2. p. 583

Truth, Drawing

“As I said last year, each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its own people. Yet experience shows us that history is on the side of liberty, that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments. To put it simply, democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City," September 23, 2010. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88483&st=&st1= 2010

People, Democracy, History, Country

“That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent, in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles — to the opposite end of the globe.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Loss

“Even if at times I can still experience outwardly some little sadness and joy, nonetheless there is in my soul a chamber in which no joy, sadness, or enjoyment from any virtue, or delight over anything that can be named, enters. This is where the All Good, which is not any particular good, resides, and it is so much the All Good that there is no other good. Although I blaspheme by speaking about it -- and I speak about it so badly because I cannot find words to express it -- I nonetheless affirm that in this manifestation of God I discover the complete truth. In it, I understand and possess the complete truth that is in heaven and in hell, in the entire world, in every place, in all things, in every enjoyment in heaven and in every creature. And I see all this is so truly and certainly that no one could convince me otherwise. Even if the whole world were to tell me otherwise, I would laugh it to scorn. Furthermore, I saw the One who is and how he is the being of all creatures. I also saw how he made me capable of understanding those realities I have just spoken about better than when I saw them in that darkness which used to delight me so. Moreover, in that state I see myself as alone with God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright, totally certain, totally celestial in him. And when I am in that state, I do not remember anything else…”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 214-216

God, Truth, World, Sadness

“Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

pg 151.
Against Method (1975)

“Regardless of whom you pray to, during war our experiences as a community and as mothers are the same.”

Leymah Gbowee (1972) Liberian peace activist

Gruber Foundation, Women's Rights Prize (2009)

War, Communication

“Parents always live a less pure life than their children, because they condone everything they do. The ability to condone everything in oneself but practically nothing in one's children is the boon that "experience" bestows on humanity. What parents call experience is really nothing but attempts, successful to the point of sheer cynicism, to belie everything which they found pure, true and right when they were young. They themselves don't notice the awful cynicism behind this incessant talk of "experience" being the highest aim in life: they only notice "inexperience" in their children, that is, the form of inexperience called purity and integrity, and then they get annoyed.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 135

Life, Children, Parent, Success

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life, Money, World, Way

“It has been my personal experience that the true flavour, the real fun, the continuous excitement of work lie in the process of doing it rather than in having it over and done with.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 135.

Lie, Personality

“I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play.”

Shigeru Miyamoto (1952) Japanese video game designer and producer

Source http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20037961,00.html?cid=recirc-peopleRecirc

People, Game

“My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was five years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It's evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That's something I never wanted. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we'd go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

Life, People, School, Sex

“My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds — what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.”

Andy Goldsworthy (1956) British sculptor and photographer

"Stone River Enters Stanford University's Outdoor Art Collection" (4 September 2001)

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 37.

Age, World, Reality

“And now in America itself after 30 years of experimenting with the Great Society programmes, there is widespread crime and violence, children kill each other with guns, neigbourhoods are insecure, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, Interview with Nathan Gardels of Global Viewpoint, Sept 26 1995 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/017-1995-09-26.pdf 1990s

Children, People, Family, Feeling

“On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit.' As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.”

Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) Brazilian racing driver

Interview for Racing is in My Blood, 1991 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIzjx9z_vUg

Thinking, Flying

“The experience of this sweet life.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XX, lines 47–48 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Life

“From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Life, World, Way, Motivation

“I'll give you an example — in Russia most of the hospitals don't have any pain medicine, they don't have any money. So if you're with kids with cancer, they can have metastases to the bone; which some say is the worst pain a human can experience. So a mother can be in a room with a child who hasn't stopped screaming in five months. …85% of the time I walk in there as a clown they'll stop screaming.”

Patch Adams (1945) Physician, activist, diplomat, author

As quoted in "Entrevista com o médico americano P. Adams" in Roda Viva - Entrevista (13 November 2007)

Money, Pain, Time

“Experience by itself is not science.”

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology

... bloße Erfahrung ist keine Wissenschaft.
Pure Phenomenology, 1917

Science

“Be sincere; talk only about your genuine experience; do not distort, exaggerate or falsify that experience.”

Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011) Indian guru

As quoted in Sathyam Sivam Sundaram (The Life Story of Sathya Sai Baba) by N. Kasturi, Ch. XXVI : Holy Joy http://www.ineval.org/sai/Teachings/SathyamSivamSundaram/s1026.html

Sincerity

“I had a bad PCP [angel dust] experience when I was 14 and I got panic disorder. And of course, I wasn’t telling anyone the truth. It’s not like you go to your dad or your doctor and say, “Yeah, I smoked PCP and I’m having a bad time.” So I became more or less agoraphobic because I’d have flashbacks. From 14 to 16, I didn’t have any friends. I stayed home most of the time. Up till then life was pretty great. The world was big and I felt I could do anything I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t do anything. But in the isolation, my imagination really had time to run. I never did any drugs until my late 20s. Unfortunately, being a child of two alcoholics, I started drinking a lot, and that’s what eventually got me back into drugs. You often hear that pot leads to harder drugs. But I think alcohol is what leads you to everything, because it takes away the fear. The worst drug experimentation I ever did was because I was drunk and didn’t care.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Talking about drugs, quoted in **
Audioslave Era

Life, Alcohol, Truth, World

“I loved Fred so, and I mean that in the nicest, warmest way: I had such affection for him artistically. I think that experience with Fred was a divine blessing. It blessed me, I know, and I don't think blessings are one sided.”

Ginger Rogers (1911–1995) American actress and dancer

Reported by Dick Richards in "Ginger: Salute to a Star", quoting Rogers from Francis Wyndham's story about Ginger Rogers, in London's "Sunday Times Magazine".

Love, Way, Thinking

“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3

Imagination, Knowledge

“Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

p 69.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Men, Pleasure, World, Imagination

“These two experiences taught me several lessons. Lesson that I have never forgotten. I did not want to learn these lessons but I found out that it isn’t what one wants in this world that one gets. Force and might makes right. Perhaps things shouldn’t be that way but thats the way they are. I learned to look with suspicion and hatred on everybody. As the years went on that idea persisted in my mind above all others. I figured that if I was strong enough and clever enough to impose my will on others, I was right. I still believe that to this day. Another lesson I learned at that time was that there were a lot of very nice things in this world. Among them were Whisky and Sodomy. But it depended on who and how they were used. I have used plenty of both since then but I have recieved more pleasure of them since; than I did those first times. Those were the days when I was learning the lessons that life teaches us all and they made me what I am today.”

Carl Panzram (1891–1930) American serial killer

sic
Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers, p. 174, (1997), Brian King, ed. ISBN 096503240X

Life, Pleasure, World, Way

“Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Cosmic Memory, Prehistory of Earth and Man.

Nature, Thinking, Science

“I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

in the German army during world War 1. (1914-1918) Quote from Otto Dix, 1891-1969, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery, 1992, pp. 17–18; cf. pp. 27–28; as cited by Roy Forward, in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 9

Life, War, World, Personality

“These are the limits of the scientific method and of logic itself, insofar as they must rely on language. Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurrences of our everyday world. But when we approach realities of another scale, these words can become obstacles.”

Hubert Reeves (1932) Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science

Hubert Reeves (1984) Atoms of silence: an exploration of cosmic evolution Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 37

World, Reality

“The thing that I think very striking is that no one, or no one I can remember, ever writes of an execution with approval. The dominant note is always horror. Society, apparently, cannot get along without capital punishment—for there are some people whom it is simply not safe to leave alive—and yet there is no one, when the pinch comes, who feels it right to kill another human being in cold blood. I watched a man hanged once. There was no question that everybody concerned knew this to be a dreadful, unnatural action. I believe it is always the same—the whole jail, warders and prisoners alike, is upset when there is an execution. It is probably the fact that capital punishment is accepted as necessary, and yet instinctively felt to be wrong, that gives so many descriptions of executions their tragic atmosphere. They are mostly written by people who have actually watched an execution and feel it to be a terrible and only partly comprehensible experience which they want to record; whereas battle literature is largely written by people who have never heard a gun go off and think of a battle as a sort of football match in which nobody gets hurt.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

People, Feeling, Literature, Question

“[T]here is more to me than just a tabloid girl. This whole "Poor lonely Jen" thing, this idea that I'm so unlucky in love? I actually feel I've been unbelievably lucky in love. Just because at this stage my life doesn't have the traditional framework to it — the husband and the two kids and the house in Connecticut — it's mine. It's my experience. And if you don't like the way it looks, then stop looking at it! Because I feel good. I don't feel like I'm supposed to be any further along or somewhere that I'm not. I'm right where I'm supposed to be.”

Jennifer Aniston (1969) television and film actress from the United States

Interview for Vogue magazine (December 2008)

Love, Life, Way, Feeling

“Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.
And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Love, Truth, World

“The design of this Memoir is to deduce strictly from a few principles, obtained chiefly by experiment, the rationale of those electrical phenomena which are produced by the mutual contact of two or more bodies, and which have been termed galvanic; its aim is attained if by means of it the variety of facts be presented as unity to the mind.”

Georg Ohm (1789–1854) German physicist and mathematician

Introductory sentence of [Georg Simon Ohm, The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically, translated by William Francis, D. Van Nostrand Co, 1891, 11]

“I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience… How would they know?”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Mat Buckland, AI Techniques for Game Programming (2002), Cincinnati, OH: Premier Press, 36 ISBN 1-931841-08-X.
Attributed

People, Understanding, Thinking

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.

Sense, Time

“If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.”

Ludwig von Mises book Socialism

Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)
Context: The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.

“You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: "What right do you have to tell me things?" I can see this question in your apprehensive look. I hear this question from your impertinent mouth, Little Man. You are afraid to look at yourself, you are afraid of criticism, Little Man, just as you are afraid of the power they promise you. You would not know how to use this power. You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night. You despise yourself Little Man. You say: "Who am I to have an opinion of my own, to determine my own life and to declare the world to be mine?" You are right: Who are you to make a claim to your life?

Love, Thinking, Night

“A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the "personal unconscious". But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the "collective unconscious".”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Source: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1934), p. 3-4
Context: A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the "personal unconscious". But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the "collective unconscious". I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

Personality

“When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
Context: When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. This K-line gets connected to those "mental agencies" that were actively involved in the memorable event. When that K-line is later "activated," it reactivates some of those mental agencies, creating a "partial mental state" resembling the original.

Idea, Problem

“The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Preface Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life http://www.spiritualbee.com/spiritual-book-by-tagore/ (1916) Context: The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation. To me the verses of the Upanishads and the teachings of Buddha have ever been things of the spirit, and therefore endowed with boundless vital growth; and I have used them, both in my own life and in my preaching, as being instinct with individual meaning for me, as for others, and awaiting for their confirmation, my own special testimony, which must have its value because of its individuality.

Heart

“To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Be Here Now (1971)
Context: I'd get to a point with my colleagues when I couldn't explain any further, because it came down to "To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.".

“My experiences with science led me to God. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

From a letter to the California State board of Education (14 September 1972)

God, Science

“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

As quoted by Edward Teller, in Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (6 September 1954), p. 62 http://books.google.de/books?id=I1QEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA62 As quoted by Edward Teller (10 October 1972), and A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan L. Mackay, p. 35 Variant: An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Pain, Personality

“A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. X.
Context: Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Life

“Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

p 6
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Context: Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. … If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of 145 grams, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a pebbles of 145 grams at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing exactly 145 grams. The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way.

“Creating the kind of connections between people that lead to collective civic action, political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences.”

Giovanni Morassutti (1980) Italian actor, theatre director and cultural entrepreneur.

Quoted in "Connected by a Thread: Arts Territory Exchange Residency in Sustainable Practice" by Gudrun Filipska, CSPA Quarterly periodical (January 25, 2019) http://www.sustainablepractice.org/2019/01/25/connected-by-a-thread/.

People, Communication

“Taking your first title is much more complicated and more difficult; it takes years of work – from go-kart to Formula One. The second comes more easily, because you’ve already got the experience.”

Niki Lauda (1949–2019) Austrian former Formula 1 racing driver

“I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”

Brigitte Bardot (1934) French model, actor, singer and animal rights activist

Beauty, Beauty, Animals, Youth

“The most gut-wrenching experience anyone will endure is knowing you’ve been used and lied to by someone you trusted.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1981

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Dancing at the Edge of the World

Bryn Mawr Commencement Address https://books.google.com/books?id=QK6TYg32CocC&pg=PA160 (1986), in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1997), p. 160

Truth, Mountain, Women, Change

“Many experiments with the Technology of Light are being undertaken in Russia. This is because the Space Brothers set up a community in that country 15 years ago. Russia was chosen because it was such a closed society, where commercial pressures did not affect scientific research. Today, says Maitreya, the Russians are well ahead of the rest of the world in this field. That is why Russia leads the way in calling for arms reductions.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Share International Magazine

Country, Light, Communication, Way

“No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Three (23 April 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Support, Fate

“If you do not have knowledge or experience of what’s in the box, then you can’t think out-of-the-box; one cannot consider an alteration or alternative without knowledge of the subject or profession.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1982

Knowledge, Thinking, Box

“The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected and coherent. The physical world and spiritual experience are both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: Cosmology, philosophy and physics

“The intimate sense of self-awareness we experience bubbling up at each moment is rooted in the originating activity of the Universe. We are all of us arising together at the invisible center of the cosmos.” We once thought that we were no bigger than our physical bodies, but now we are discovering that we are deeply connected participants in the continuous co-arising of the entire Universe. Awakening to our larger identity as both unique and inseparably connected with a co- arising Universe transforms feelings of existential separation into experiences of subtle communion as bio-cosmic beings. We are far richer, deeper, more complex, and more alive than we ever thought”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: Cosmology, philosophy and physics

“Spirituality is to experience the infinite in the transcendental state. There is no other definition to it.”

Swami Samarpanananda Monk, Author, Teacher

The World of Religions ( Page 20 )

“Then, there is the secret life.
There, alone and in our own realm;
Here, we fantasize about sex, romance,
and being wealthy. No one knows.
Except, when we cross over
and violate societal mores. We betray,
experience relationships that would be scorned
in the other two lives. And to the extent we deviate
from the norms, the greater amount of time
is expended for clandestine pursuits.
And we stay here, because it’s addictive.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

2003
From the poem, "The Addictive Life.”

Sex, Secret, Time, Life

“As an administrator, I always hired people whose experience greatly surpassed mine, especially in areas that necessitated more knowledge than I possessed.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1982

People, Knowledge

“There are certain songs that can really cause you to re-experience an overwhelming melancholy which leads to tears when you hear them. But it's actually not the song that makes you cry, it is the people behind the memories.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

People, Tear, Cry, Memory

“The fastest way, the most powerful way, the most effective way to experience the characteristics of divinity is to be a cause of another person experiencing the characteristics of divinity.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Personality, Way

“I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.”

Oscar Wilde book Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Source: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.”

C.G. Jung book Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Love, Faith, Hope, Effort

“Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.”

Deborah Levy (1959) British writer

Source: Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

World, Way, Feeling

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117 Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846) Context: Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

Wise, Hope, Life, World

“If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

The earliest appearance of this proverb yet located is in Eliza Cook's Journal Vol. 11, (1854), p. 128, and the earliest attribution to Addison yet found is in Public Ledger Almanac (1887), p. 20.
Disputed
Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_Era/XD8DAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=addison%20%22hope%20your%20guardian%20genius%22&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover&bsq=addison%20%22hope%20your%20guardian%20genius%22 Many Thoughts of Many Minds

Life, Hope, Success, Perseverance

“The life of every human being on earth can depend on the experience, judgment, and vigilance of the person in the Oval Office.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Life, Dependency, Personality

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

Books

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 41
The Gay Science (1882)

Failure, Question, Success

“Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”

Max Frisch book Homo Faber

Source: Homo Faber (1957)

World

“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Life, People, Courage, Wise

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Feeling, Time

“One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Variant: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, Help

“God intentionally allows you to go through painful experiences to equip you for ministry to others.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

God, Pain

“Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience…. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are, and Who You Truly Want To Be.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Love, Passion, Change

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)
Context: Experimenters are the schocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.

Question, Nature, Science

“From experience. That something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 515
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation

“Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love, Pleasure, Joy, Dependency

“Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

Life, Lie, Soul

“Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Life, World, Learning, Help

“Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from
Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.”

Malcolm X book The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Life, Birth, Understanding, Personality

“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638); Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze, as translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (1914)
Other quotes
Source: Discorsi E Dimostrazioni Matematiche: Intorno a Due Nuoue Scienze, Attenenti Alla Mecanica & I Movimenti Locali

Truth

“Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)
Variant: Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Food, Soul

“[Whose_property]Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh no.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“Osteopathy” (1901), in Mark Twain's Speeches, p. 253 http://books.google.com/books?id=jmhaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA253&dq=%22Whose+property+is+my+body%22 Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“I don't have to have faith, I have experience.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

Faith

“If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Music, Way

“The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one's own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Support, Decision

“Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

“In my experience, we don't make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn't personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Source: Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

Appearance, Personality

“His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Love, Passion, Madness

“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Chapter 26
Context: Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.

Life, Parting

“Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship.”

Brian L. Weiss

Source: Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love

Understanding, Nature, Past, Childhood