Quotes about experiment
page 3

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

William Faulkner book If I Forget Thee

Source: The Wild Palms

Pain, Wise

“Experience is a question of instinct about life.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Source: Lady Windermere's Fan

Life, Question

“But in his experience it was only a matter of time before the normal balance of the universe restored itself and started doing the usual terrible things to him.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

Universe, Time

“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Truth, Lie, History

“In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric.
The secret isn't that you're not being told.
The secret is that you're not able to hear.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Secret

“We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.”

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

Error, Past

“That the truest experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Variant: That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 97.
Context: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

World, Freedom

“Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.”

Corrie ten Boom book The Hiding Place

Source: The Hiding Place

God, Memory, Past, Future

“… don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience…”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Reading

“Jesus tells us to keep our eyes open so we are not fooled by the signs indicating that the End Times are near. As we get closer to the End Times, many people are going to claim to be the Messiah and claim to have the answers for a troubled world. Additionally, the book of Revelation tells us to expect a period of ceaseless, unending, terrible war. It appears that we are already preparing for this time as fifty percent of all research scientists today are involved in arms development and there is at least one military weapon and four thousand pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child on earth. Finally, there will be more and more disease and devastation. Today, as you read this, millions of people in the world are being afflicted by insufficient food, the spread of new diseases, and the devastating effects of natural disasters. As we get closer to the End Times, there will be more and more famine. There will also be an increase in earthquakes and natural disasters. Christ also spoke of pestilence: the spread of new diseases. Our world will experience a spate of tragic new diseases that we will be unable to control.”

David Jeremiah

Source: The Prophecy Answer Book

War, People, Books, World

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

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Life, Secret, Soul

“Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“Your desire is your prayer. Picture the fulfillment of your desire now and feel its reality and you will experience the joy of the answered.
Dr. Joseph Murphy”

Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) American writer

Feeling, Reality, Joy

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

World

“While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

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

Learning

“Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Training

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness […] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find […] a being which immediately recognises itself, […] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

Idea, Time

“Do you think it takes true pain to experience true pleasure?”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Oh My Goth

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking

“Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Light

“If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.”

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

“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 19
Context: It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Love

“From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Education, Joy

“Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.”

Hannah Arendt book The Human Condition

Source: The Human Condition

Men, Sense

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Life, Secret

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Thinking, Sense, Future, Dependency

“No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Variant: i am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.
that is the true experience of freedom:having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Source: Eleven Minutes

World, Freedom

“Each person's life – each lifeform,
in fact – represents a world, a
unique way in which the universe experiences itself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, World, Way, Universe

“Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The Analects, as reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 279.
Attributed

Way

“Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We can not learn men from books.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book V, Chapter 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Vivian Grey (1826)

Men, Books, Learning

“The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life, World, Beauty, Understanding

“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“True forgiveness is when you can say, "Thank you for that experience.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Forgiveness

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

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

Books, Drawing

“We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings emersed in a human experience.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

God, Religion, Soul

“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Source: Leonardo's Notebooks

Error, Knowledge, Science

“No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Helen Adams Keller (p. 60. Helen Keller's Journal: 1936-1937, Doubleday, Doran & company, inc., 1938)

Soul, Suffering, Success, Motivational

“Remember, young man, experience is not the best teacher. Other people's experience is the best teacher. By reading about the lives of great people, you can unlock the secrets to what made them great.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

People, Secret, Teachers, Reading

“Great designers produce pleasurable experiences.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday Things

Pleasure

“Welcome the view that the things which you think are wrecking your life - like your thoughts and emotions, or illness and death - are actually gifts for your transformation… Whether life presents us with a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound, a pleasant smell or an unpleasant smell, a pleasant thought or an unpleasant thought, it's sheer delight because instead of identifying with the experience, we simply touch it and let it go.”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Life, Death, Thinking

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Books, World, History, Reading

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

People, Birth, Thinking

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

18 December 1831
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Men, History, Light, Learning

“The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain

Time, Flying

“But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and…”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Beauty, Angels, Light

“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

Pleasure

“My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Cecil Graham, Act II
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

People

“Words without experience are meaningless.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Life

“Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Appearance

“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book II, Ch. 1, sec. 19
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Knowledge

“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Time

“If historical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”

Ludwig von Mises book Human Action

Source: Human Action (1949), Chapter XV. The Market, § 4 The Scope and Method of Catallactics

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

Personality

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”

Yukio Mishima book Sun and Steel

Source: Sun and Steel

Life, Thinking

“The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy; and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Source: Existence & the Existent

Truth, Intelligence

“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms

Time

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.”

Henry Beston book The Outermost House

Source: The Outermost House

Nature, Parting

“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Men, World, Literature, Personality

“The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.”

T.D. Jakes (1957) American bishop

Source: The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord

Art, Painting

“Wisdom is the daughter of experience.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Variant: Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Wisdom, Daughters

“I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.”

H.P. Lovecraft book Old Bugs

Source: Old Bugs

Life

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.

Art

“It's been interesting, "Frostpine said casually. "I wanted Daja to get some experience of other smiths'-and other mages'- ways of doing things, if only so she can see mine is best.”

Tamora Pierce book Cold Fire

Source: Cold Fire

Way

“I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: An Object Of Beauty

Life, Imagination

“Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Context: Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. Men wrongly complain of Experience; with great abuse they accuse her of leading them astray but they set Experience aside, turning from it with complaints as to our ignorance causing us to be carried away by vain and foolish desires to promise ourselves, in her name, things that are not in her power; saying that she is fallacious. Men are unjust in complaining of innocent Experience, constantly accusing her of error and of false evidence.

“In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.”

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

Life, Pain, Courage

“Searching for truth is itself a big illusion because whatever we term the truth is always and everywhere. We don't have to search for it; we don't have to seek it; it always is. Now the only problem is your inability to experience life beyond what you call mind; or right now your capability to experience life only through the limited dimension that we call mind. That is the only problem.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Himalayan Lust

Life, Truth, Search, Problem

“Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: On Being Ill

Health, Truth, Parting

“He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Health, Way, Drink

“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”

Ben Okri (1959) Nigerian writer

Source: Astonishing the Gods

Law, Suffering, Time

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Looking Back: Diane Arbus at the Met" http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/03/21/050321craw_artworld?currentPage=all, The New Yorker, March 21, 2005. Retrieved February 4, 2010. source: Sass, Louis A. "'Hyped on Clarity': Diane Arbus and the Postmodern Condition". Raritan, volume 25, number 1, pp. 1–37, Summer 2005. <br><br> <br class="br">Source: Kimmelman, Michael, The Profound Vision of Diane Arbus: Flaws in Beauty, Beauty in Flaws, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/arts/design/the-profound-vision-of-diane-arbus-flaws-in-beauty-beauty-in.html, 1 November 2018, The New York Times, 11 March 2005

Personality, Life, People

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. 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

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: On the Heights of Despair

Life, Universe

“Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!

*It’s sad. Love looks like a nice thing, but it’s actually very rough when you experience it.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Love, Sadness

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Past, Future

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Misattributed
Source: Often attributed to Kerouac's On the Road, the quote cannot be found in that book, nor in any of Kerouac's other published works.

Teachers

“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”

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

God, People, Religion

“To experience the ultimate you have to be willing to obliterate the self-created boundaries of individuality, you have to be willing to dissolve. That state of unbounded freedom is a state of oneness with Shiva – an unconditioned state beyond physical experience, beyond imaginative speculation, beyond all conceptual understanding.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga

Imagination, Understanding, Freedom

“A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.”

Barbara Ehrenreich book Nickel and Dimed

Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Life, Help

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

Interviewed by J. T. LeRoy, "Strange Innocence," Vanity Fair, July 2001

World, Suffering

“If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Masterful Personality (1923).

Books, Fear, Failure, Memory

“If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it fulfills its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Variant: We have spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others, sruti or what is heard, and smṛti or what is remembered. Śaṅkara equates them with pratyakṣa or intuition and anumana or inference. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.

Religion, Soul, Communication, Change

“To those who oppose the steps I’m announcing today, let me say that I respect your passion and share your commitment to liberty and democracy. The question is how we uphold that commitment. I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result. Moreover, it does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. Even if that worked — and it hasn’t for 50 years — we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos. We are calling on Cuba to unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans by ending unnecessary restrictions on their political, social, and economic activities. In that spirit, we should not allow U. S. sanctions to add to the burden of Cuban citizens that we seek to help.”

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

2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)

People, Democracy, Question, Passion

“Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences…. It wasn't very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real. … A child needs to be listened to and talked to at 3 and 4 and 5 years of age … Parents should not wait for the sophisticated conversation of a teenager.”

Bob Keeshan (1927–2004) United States Marine

Essay in The New York Times (1979); as quoted in "Bob Keeshan, Creator and Star of TV's 'Captain Kangaroo,' Is Dead at 76" in The New York Times (24 January 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/24/arts/bob-keeshan-creator-and-star-of-tv-s-captain-kangaroo-is-dead-at-76.html?pagewanted=all

Age, Family, Parent, Time

“The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvation Army in the band, the Roman Catholic in the Mass and the Baptist in immersion; if the High Anglican likes incense and ceremonial, and the Methodist puts his emphasis on personal experience, the fellowship of the authentic class meeting and Charles Wesley’s hymns, why talk of disunity?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

Love, God, Silence, Past

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Beauty, Art

“Just as a bird, wherever it goes, flies with its wings as its only burden, so too, the bhikkhu becomes content with robes to protect his body and with almsfood to maintain his stomach, and wherever he goes he sets out taking only these with him. Possessing this aggregate of noble virtue, he experiences within himself a bliss that is blameless.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Sutta 51, Verse 15, p. 450
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses)

Bird

“I spent a lot of time on my — in my farewell address talking about the state of our democracy. It goes without saying that essential to that is a free press. That is part of how this place, this country, this grand experiment of self-government has to work. It doesn’t work if we don’t have a well-informed citizenry, and you are the conduit through which they receive the information about what’s taking place in the halls of power. So America needs you and our democracy needs you. We need you to establish a baseline of facts and evidence that we can use as a starting point for the kind of reasoned and informed debates that ultimately lead to progress. And so my hope is is that you will continue with the same tenacity that you showed us, to do the hard work of getting to the bottom of stories and getting them right and to push those of us in power to be the best version of ourselves and to push this country to be the best version of itself.”

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

On the role of the press in a democracy
2017, Final News Conference as President (January 2017)

Hope, Democracy, Time, Parting

“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, "Quotation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli
Variant: The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Wisdom, Age

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. … The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Children, Truth