Quotes about experiment
page 33

“Reincarnation is but a part of this probability system, the part that falls within your particular universe. There are also root dreams shared by the race as a whole. Most of these are not as symbolic as Jung thought them to be but are literal interpretations of the abilities used by the inner self. For that matter, as you know, flying dreams need not be symbolic of anything. They can be valid experiences, though often intermixed with other dream elements.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 309-310, quoting from Session 282

Dreams, Universe, Parting, Flying

“This program is not a place where personal opinion should be mixed up with ascertainable facts…It is not, I think, humanly possible for any reporter to be completely objective, for we are all to some degree prisoners of our education, travel, reading—the sum total of our experience.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Introducing the first broadcast of "This is the News" (September 1947)

Education, Travel, Thinking, Reading

“Lor bless ye, yes! These critters ain't like white folks, you know; they gets over things, only manage right. Now, they say," said Haley, assuming a candid and confidential air, "that this kind o' trade is hardening to the feelings; but I never found it so. Fact is, I never could do things up the way some fellers manage the business. I've seen 'em as would pull a woman's child out of her arms, and set him up to sell, and she screechin' like mad all the time; — very bad policy — damages the article — makes 'em quite unfit for service sometimes. I knew a real handsome gal once, in Orleans, as was entirely ruined by this sort o' handling. The fellow that was trading for her didn't want her baby; and she was one of your real high sort, when her blood was up. I tell you, she squeezed up her child in her arms, and talked, and went on real awful. It kinder makes my blood run cold to think of 't; and when they carried off the child, and locked her up, she jest went ravin' mad, and died in a week. Clear waste, sir, of a thousand dollars, just for want of management, — there's where 't is. It's always best to do the humane thing, sir; that's been my experience.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce.
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 1 In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity

Way, Feeling, Business, Thinking

“A beautifully constructed borsch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.”

Saki book Beasts and Super-Beasts

"The Blind Spot"
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)

“It's very severe, but very honest. Unless Japanese people feel embarrassed from the experience of getting harsh comments, saying [new games] could have been better is not an opinion they would take seriously. When they're embarrassed and they feel obliged to change, it would make a difference.”

Keiji Inafune (1965) Japanese video game designer

Source: "Q&A: Mega Man Creator Wants Japan to Admit Failure" https://www.wired.com/2012/04/keiji-inafune-qa/. WIRED. Retrieved 2018-07-15.

People, Feeling, Game, Change

“Take a moment to remember the times on your own spiritual quest when you felt most enthusiastic. We want to pinpoint the times in which we felt more God conscious and devotional than ever before. Conversely, look at the times when you felt unenthused and do a similar analysis. These questions might help stimulate your thought process: Are you enthusiastic about your existence as a servant of the Lord? Are you enthusiastic to follow the basic principles that will help elevate your consciousness? Are you enthusiastic in the association of saintly people? Are you enthusiastic about what you can experience in your purest state? We must examine our spiritual life on a daily, weekly, and even yearly basis. This examination will help us recognize how various activities and thoughts affect us. We should note how the quality of our experiences varies according to our absorption in the process of bhakti.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior V: Making the Mind Your Best Friend (Hari-Nama Press, 2003), Chapter 4 - The Necessity of Enthusiasm

Life, God, People, Question

“An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Mark Tobey Retrospective Exhibition, New York, Whitney Museum, 1951
1950's

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

War, People, Democracy, Birth

“French music is really very sensory, and appeals to sense of smell, taste, touch. It can be languorous, and almost erotic. Russian music is very subjective, sometimes whiny, breast-beating 'Look how I suffer, look how I suffer!'. German music is, to use your word, metaphysical. It really asks those existential questions of 'How do I relate to the Universe?', 'Is there a heaven?', 'How am I like a brook, or a leaf on a tree?'. I know this was the music that most challenged Schnabel. He said Mozart was the most inaccessible of the great masters, because with the fewest number of notes, he accesses the deepest levels of human awareness and experience.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

Music, Question, Sense, Tree

“The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists—and all those who abuse public credulity—is founded on errors in this type of calculation.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Imprimerie royale, 1784), trans. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 195

People, Art, Error, Thinking

“This is a report of an actual industrial experiment designed to determine why workers resisted job changes and what could be done about the problem. The research arose out of the need to change industrial operations to meet competitive conditions and was instituted after earlier incentives and propaganda procedures had proved ineffectual.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Abstract, lead sentences
"Overcoming resistance to change." 1948

Problem, Change

“The knowledge of others which experience gives us, is of slight value when compared with that which we obtain from having proved the inconstancy of our own desires.”

Arthur Helps (1813–1875) British writer

Source: Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd. 1901, p.26.

Knowledge

“Here we come upon one of the most profound reasons for Socratic irony: direct language is not adequate for communicating the experience of existing, the authentic consciousness of being, the seriousness of life as we live it, or the solitude of decision making.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 156
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Life, Communication, Decision, Solitude

“My limited experience of such things told me that you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming after it.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 5

Truth

“Quite possibly this aesthetic contemplation coincides with religious feeling or with the uplift of the religious spirit, since in a work of art it is the deepest inwardness that expresses itself. It is necessary however, to bear in mind the essential distinction that the contemplation or uplift in art – i. e., the experience of pure art – contains nothing dreamy or vague. It is exactly the contrary; true artistic experience is altogether real and conscious”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from 'Grundbegriffe der neuen Gestaltenden Kunst', essay by Van Doesburg (published between 1921-23 in De Stijl) - last Chapter; as quoted in 'Fifty Years of Accomplishment, From Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock', by Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co. 1964, p. 86
1920 – 1926

Art, Feeling

“I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Ayandegan (1973), p. 4

Understanding, Problem, Strong, Drawing

“The idea of God is an interpretation of experience.”

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

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

God, Idea

“Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.”

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer

Vol. V. p. 224, Vol. I, p. 143
Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858)

“Dear Reichsführer, among 10's of millions of Jews in Europe, there are, I figure, at least 2-3 millions of men and women who are fit enough to work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem presents us with, I hold the view that those 2-3 millions should be specially selected and preserved. This can however only be done if at the same time they are rendered incapable to propagate. About a year ago I reported to you that agents of mine have completed the experiments necessary for this purpose. I would like to recall these facts once more. Sterilization, as normally performed on persons with hereditary diseases is here out of the question, because it takes too long and is too expensive. Castration by X-ray however is not only relatively cheap, but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time. I think that at this time it is already irrelevant whether the people in question become aware of having been castrated after some weeks or months, once they feel the effects. Should you, Reichsführer, decide to choose this way in the interest of the preservation of labor, then Reichsleiter Bouhler would be prepared to place all physicians and other personnel needed for this work at your disposal. Likewise he requested me to inform you that then I would have to order the apparatus so urgently needed with the greatest speed. Heil Hitler! Yours, Viktor Brack.”

Viktor Brack (1904–1948) SS officer

Letter written to Heinrich Himmler (23 June 1942).

Women, Men, People, Disease

“Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience and protests are becoming our everyday tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to AFL–CIO (1961)

History, Understanding, Reading

“Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Sense, Memory, Loss, Past

“I have my team focused on the front end, working on the user experience, and making sure we have all the wiki-like tools people need to work on the site. We're just cranking away.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

About Wikia Search, in an interview with Susan Kuchinskas in iMediaConnection, March 26, 2009 http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/22475.asp (only days before Wales would shut down Wikia Search and lay off two developers)

People

“Children are like men, the experience of others does not help them.”

Alphonse Daudet book Jack

Les enfants sont comme les hommes, l'expérience d'autrui ne leur sert pas.
Jack: mœurs contemporaines (1876; repr. Paris: E. Dentu, 1877); Laura Ensor (trans.) Jack (London: Dent, 1896) vol. 1, p. 83.

Men, Children, Help

“One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Source: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990), p. 79 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Boy, Parent, Light, Time

“The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Abraham Lincoln (1864)

Faith, Color, Weather

“The photo can insist on reviewing moments that were unseen, or not know they were seen but passed in viewing. John Cage said (I don't know if they were his own remarks or Zen) his goal was not to get somewhere; he just wanted to enjoy the trip. That's the quality I want in all of my work, that a specific goal or accomplishment would be allied to the fact. I noticed a long time age, when I went to a strange country, that I had the best time and the greatest experiences when I thought I was lost, because when you are lost you look so much harder.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

Age, Photo, Time, Country

“My loving children, my children who were created with God's beauty, my wise children, whatever difficulty you may have, do not ever leave His charge. Just as the prophets of God kept their faith firm and were tolerant in spite of the problems they had, no matter what difficulties you may experience, be tolerant, be forbearant and embrace all living things as your own life.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The Tree That Fell To The West: Autobiography of a Sufi (2003)

Love, Life, God, Children

“If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism…. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Opium (1929)

Sense, Housing, Dead

“Argument is conclusive… but… it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may never rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment. For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns, his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.”

Roger Bacon (1220–1292) medieval philosopher and theologian

Cited in: Carol A. Dingle (2000) Memorable Quotations: Philosophers of Western Civilization. p. 21

Truth, Knowledge, Learning

“About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

"Out on a Limb." Details Magazine. October 1996.

Beauty, Dreams, Time, Cry

“If the movements of reflection in classical philosophy could be depicted in the structure of Homer's Odysseus, in which a wandering hero returns home via a thousand false paths across the whole world, in order there to be recognized by his woman, that is, by his "soul," then the reflections of modern thinking in no way still find their way back "home." They either move on the spot in essenceless flurries, drained of experience, or they drift on, like the eternal Jew or the Flying Dutchman, without hope of arriving, through the perpetually alien. … For the modern subject, a "vagabond in existence," there is no longer any return home.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 538

World, Hope, Way, Home

“In the Autumn semester, 1955, I taught Principles of Economics, and found it a challenge to convey basic microeconomic theory to students. Why/how could any market approximate a competitive equilibrium? I resolved that on the first day of class the following semester, I would try running a market experiment that would give the students an opportunity to experience an actual market, and me the opportunity to observe one in which I knew, but they did not know what were the alleged driving conditions of supply and demand in that market”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Vernon L. Smith (2002) in: " Vernon L. Smith - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/smith-bio.html". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 13 Jun 2014.

Autumn

“Most people, they have these near-death experiences. They go through a tunnel and they meet a bright light at the end of the tunnel. That bright light is actually their higher self, or the soul, which people reconnect with after they die, after you leave the physical body. In our Sufi practice we aspire to die before we die, to reconnect with that bright light, the higher self, while we’re still in a physical body.”

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (1953) Sufi mystic

interviewed in One: The Movie Full interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gby6y4i4ljU

Death, People, Soul, Light

“I've had some experience in this arena. So it wasn't foreign to me to have a woman say she doesn't want to see me anymore.”

Larry David (1947) American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer

Of acting in Woody Allen's film. <br class="br">Interview, Esquire, September 18, 2009 http://www.esquire.com/features/the-screen/larry-david-interview-0709

“God is still around. One day, you're going to need him. The problems of life will begin to overwhelm you; disappointments will begin to beat upon the door of your life like a tidal wave. And if you don't have a deep and patient faith, you aren't going to be able to make it. I know this from my own experience.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

Life, God, Faith, Disappointment

“People kill nonhuman animals for food, for their skins, and sometimes just for fun. We enslave animals and force them to work for us. We experiment on them and justify their suffering in terms of our advantage. Because most of us want to be able to view ourselves as good people (and, perhaps more importantly, because we want others to view us as good people), we may be motivated to view nonhumans in such a way that these activities are rendered morally unproblematic. One way to do this is to view other animals as utterly different from us.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 111

People, Food, Way, Motivation

“Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education

“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Preface
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Way, Reading, Personality

“Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chucklehead, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions—the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 5, “Teeth” (p. 109)

Age, Birth, Sense, Universe

“People’s lives are a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group. … Your life experience will never far exceed the expectations of your peers, because to stay connected to them there is an unconscious contract that says we’re going to be within this range of each other. Now, on the other hand, if for some reason your friends have a higher expectation for life than you do, just to stay on the team you’ve got to raise your standard. And that's the beauty of life.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

At an Unleash the Power Within seminar, on video at The Next Level Newsletter (September 2005) http://www2.anthonyrobbins.com/nextlevel/SEP05/Success/index.html

Life, People, Beauty

“Trump’s lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough. But what he’s doing here is more sinister. Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters. It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of President he’d be.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in (August 25, 2016)

Hate, Dogs, Support, Knowledge

“We have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.
But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Weight Of Authority

Life, Fear, Law

“you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

World, Learning

“I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse. The Obamas represent the future, not the past.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

"Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Iran and More" at Salon.com (8 January 2008)

Education, Knowledge, Grass, Time

“Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

On Prohibition; sometimes misquoted as referring to Prohibition as "a noble experiment"; reported as such in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 47-48.
The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover (1928)

Motivation, Country

“If displeased with any man, do all you can to prevent his seeing it, for otherwise he will become estranged. And occasions often arise when he might and would have served you had you not lost him by showing your dislike. Of this I have had experience to my own profit. For once and again I have felt ill-disposed towards some one who not being aware of my hostility has afterwards helped me when I needed help and proved my good friend.”

Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) Italian writer, historian and politician

Number 324.
Counsels and Reflections (1857)

Hostility, Help

““Are we in a dream?” Lebret asked. “Might we actually be dead and in some afterlife?”
“How could we test either supposition?” the scientist asked, with characteristic practical-mindedness. “What conceivable experiment could we design to falsify such a claim?””

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 14, “Confinement” (p. 133)

Dreams, Dead

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. […] Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 29, "While the Doctors Consult", p. 366.

Women, Children, Understanding, Sea

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“I think when you’re shooting on such a tight budget and schedule, the insanity and the energy and the sense of spirit is what makes the experience unique. Ten percent more isn’t going to make enough of a difference and anything that would — double the budget, triple the time — then you’re making a different kind of film.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Filmmaker Magazine, ”Donkey Punch” co-writer-director, Olly Blackburn, Jason, Guerrasio, 15 January 2008, 23 February 2012, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2008/01/donkey-punch-co-writer-director-olly-blackburn/, Independent Feature Project]

Thinking, Sense, Time

“The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. …As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), X. Revolutions as Changes of World View, p. 114 (3rd edn.)

Books, Way, Learning, Change

“I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

"A Word of Explanation" in Young India (January 1921)
1920s

Secret, Game

“Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts — that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 141

Truth, World, Understanding, Universe

“If I wanted a full-scale manifestation, one that was apparent to other people, then I would do a ritual. I have displayed the snake god to other people. Or I have consciously hypnotised them into accepting my psychotic belief system, given them drugs, and made them think they are having the experience I have. Whatever you want. I’m not fussed.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

God, People, Thinking

“That [her lessons with Kandinsky] was a new artistic experience; Kandinsky was quite unlike the other teachers, and explained things thoroughly and penetratingly and regarded me as a human being with conscious aspirations, capable of setting myself targets to aim for. It was new to me and impressed me.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 121
undated quotes

Teachers

“If I were to be asked what two of the root principles are which we should always keep in view in trying to decide on a political issue, in judging of legislation, in judging of political action, I think I should say common sense and the preservation of what always has been the most precious thing in this country—individual freedom. If you apply these tests, you will seldom go far wrong. There are many people to-day who think you can cure the ills of the world by legislation: but you must examine the legislation they propose to see whether it is adapted to the practical experience of daily life, whether the freedom of the individual is affected by it. And if you cannot be satisfied on those points, you may be quite sure that that legislation in the long run will do more harm than it will do good.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 18-19.
1926

Life, People, World, Thinking

“…engaged themselves in mainly exposing the policies and programmes of the bourgeois leaders including Gandhi without participating in these struggles and sharing their bitter experience. The result was that the bourgeois leadership and the people were getting closer to each other.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

On the early communist sectarianism of the 1920s quoted in "The Mahatma and the Ism" in page=9.

People

“I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduely inhibited by theoretical untidyness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus.”

Robert H. Dicke (1916–1997) American astronomer

as quoted by

Chance, Heart

“We can teach no virtues we do not practice," occurred to me this afternoon; for without learning by experience how a virtue is acquired, how can we teach any one to acquire it? I thought of this in connection with the experience of undutiful children. By the working of this natural cause, they will not make their own children dutiful. Read in Luke of the angel which appeared to Christ in Gethsemane, strengthening Him. We all see this angel when we say truly, "Thy will, not mine, be done.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

22 August 1875.
The Walk With God (1919)

Children, Angels, Nature, Learning

“Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis, could charge his elite scientists in Salomon’s House with practicing self-censorship to avoid publicizing dangerous knowledge. Here is how the Father of Salomon’s House describes their practice: “We have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all a oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.” Bacon, the first prophet of the new relation between science and society and of the “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate,” knew better than we that knowledge is dangerous, that publication is a public and politically relevant act, and that self-censorship on the part of scientists is necessary and desirable. The passage is also remarkable for its wonderful ambiguity regarding whether scientists or the State has ultimate authority over dangerous knowledge”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Forbidding Science: Some Beginning Reflections (2006)

Secret, Nature, Knowledge, Thinking

“We think this issue needs to matter to anyone who believes in true equal opportunity and justice. If we learned anything from our experience with the Proposal 2 battle, it's that these attempts to allow discrimination in Michigan must be stopped and a united effort by many communities is the only hope to stop them.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

Justice, Hope, Communication, Thinking

“Galileo had the experience of beholding the heavens as they actually are for perhaps the first time, and wherever he looked he found evidence to support the Copernican system against the Ptolemaic, or at least weaken the authority of the ancients. This shattering experience—of observing the depths of the universe, of being the first mortal to know what the heavens are actually like—made so deep a an impression… that it is only by considering the events of 1609… that one can understand the subsequent direction of his life.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen,
The Birth of a New Physics (1959)

Life, Understanding, Support, Universe

“Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience.”

Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004) film composer

AOL Online Host (1995-07-11)

Time

“It seems to me from my experience where I have been in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts. They do not do this with the white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the Clinic he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results among the colored people. His work in my opinion should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County’s white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

People, Color, Knowledge, Success

“It's really a therapeutic experience for me to begin to write about the coup because I was involved in the 1987 coup and in particular the 2000 coup. For someone who was involved in all the coups it has been difficult for me to open up and write. The fact that I am able to write marks a turning point for me.”

Tupeni Baba (1941) Fijian politician

Interview, 19 May 2005, about his book, Speight of Violence (coauthored with two others).

“To tell you the truth although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experience I have had.”

George Stephenson (1781–1848) English civil engineer and mechanical engineer

Letter to the directors of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1821 after seeing the rails being made by John Birkinshaw.

Truth

“It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with The Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism (1999) ISBN 1559391278

Dreams, Memory

“Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Richard Avedon in Silverman, Stephen M. Dancing on the Ceiling. Knopf, 1996. ISBN 0679414126.

Way, Learning

“We saw the choices. The audience will be given the opportunity. They can see Him and Her, or they can see Them. … Well, for the cinephiles and the people who really want to commit, I would definitely say, “See Him and Her.” It’s the full experience. … I’ve always thought Him and Her. But it’s funny, in Toronto, when Harvey Weinstein saw the film for the first time, he saw Her and Him, and he was determined. He was like, “That’s how it has to be seen!””

Jessica Chastain (1977) American actress

So it depends.
On her role in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2013-2014), written and directed by Ned Benson
Vulture interview (2014)

People, Time, Dependency

“Every American is hard-wired in history or experience to be libertarian about something.”

Bob Barr (1948) Republican and Libertarian politician

Marshall News Messenger (27 July 2008), Copelin, Laylan Libertarians want to be kingmakers in legislative races http://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/07/28/0728libertarians.html, Marhall News Messenger, 27 July 2008. <br class="br">2000s, 2008

History

“For the most part, these are not new lessons, but lessons learned in different circumstances and surroundings. The fact that they are not new is of course a lesson in itself — we must continually strive to benefit from past experiences and structure our management so that past related experience can be brought to bear on current problems.”

John H. Disher (1921–1988) American aeronautical engineer and NASA manager

"Skylab Lessons Learned" (22 September 1975) at NASA Office of Logic Design http://klabs.org/richcontent/Misc_Content/AGC_And_History/Skylab/Skylab_Disher.htm

Problem, Learning, Past, Parting

“[Romeo … transfers his affections from Rosalind to Juliet] 'A lover, my dear Lady Betty,' said Flora, 'may, I conceive, persevere in his suit, under very discouraging circumstances. Affection can (now and then) withstand very severe storms of rigour, but not a long polar frost of downright indifference. Don't, even with your attractions, try the experiment upon any lover whose faith you value. Love will subsist on wonderfully little hope, but not altogether without it.”

Walter Scott book Waverley

Source: Waverley (1814), Chapter LIV

Love, Faith, Hope, Lovers

“I have learned from experience that it is useful to begin by drawing one's picture clearly on a virgin canvas, first having noted the desired effect on a white or gray paper, and then to do the picture section by section, as immediately finished as one can, so that when it has all been covered there is very little to retouch. I have noticed that whatever is finished at one sitting is fresher, better drawn, and profits more from many lucky accidents, while when one retouches this initial harmonious glow is lost. I think that this method is particularly good for foliage, which needs a good deal of freedom.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1828, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 239 – 240
1820 - 1850

Thinking, Freedom, Learning, Drawing

“I wished to show that Pythagoras, the first founder of the vegetable regimen, was at once a very great physicist and a very great physician; that there has been no one of a more cultured and discriminating humanity; that he was a man of wisdom and of experience; that his motive in commending and introducing the new mode of living was derived not from any extravagant superstition, but from the desire to improve the health and the manners of men.”

Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) Italian physician and naturalist

The Pythagorean Diet: for the Use of the Medical Faculty

Wisdom, Men, Health, Motivation

“We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. IV (1928)

Idea

“I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans? The prosecution says that I had something to do with the freezing experiments which were performed in the concentration camps under the auspices of the air force. That is pure nonsense! I was much too busy to know about these medical experiments, and if anybody had asked me, I would have disapproved violently. It must have been Himmler who thought up these stupid experiments, although I think he shirked his responsibility by committing suicide. I am not too unhappy about it because I would not particularly enjoy sitting on the same bench with him. The same is true of that drunken Robert Ley, who did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started. He was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Stupidity, Law, Business, Thinking

“Chilcot will not be a verdict, that much is clear. However, it could still supply the damning evidence for the jury to bring a conviction in. In a triumph of hope over experience my political sense tells me to expect fireworks.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Hope, Sense

“A man in daily muddy contact with field experiments could not be expected to have much faith in any direct assumption of independently distributed normal errors.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Source: Science and Statistics (1976), p. 795

Faith, Error

“…one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis MacNiece, “From That Island”, pp. 31–32
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life, Flowers, Sense, Drawing

“A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 10

Men, Friendship, Way, Past

“Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Wadewitz, Adrianne. (August 12, 2013). "What I learned as the worst student in the class" http://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/08/12/what-i-learned-worst-student-class. HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance Collaboratory. — reprinted and cited in: "How Adrianne Wadewitz learnt to embrace failure" http://www.smh.com.au/world/how-adrianne-wadewitz-learnt-to-embrace-failure-20140425-zqzgx.html. The Sydney Morning Herald. April 25, 2014. Retrieved April 25, 2014.

Way, Thinking, Personality

“… as a matter of fact it is nice to paint a happy picture after a sad one. I think there is a kind of loneliness in a lot of them which I don't think about as the fact that I'm lonely and therefore I paint lonely pictures, but I like kind of lonely things anyhow; so if the forms express that to me, there is a certain excitement that I have about that.... What I try to do is to create the painting so that the overall thing has the particular emotion; not just the forms in it.... in other words, there's a particular static or heavy form that can have a look to it, an experience that translated through the form; so then it does have a mood. And when that is there, well then it becomes it becomes a painting whereas all the other pictures that have far more interesting shapes and so on, don't become that to me.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

n.p.
1960's, Living Art, 1963

Happiness, Sadness, Mood, Thinking

“Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 90

Victory, Training

“Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911)

Knowledge

“[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Source: The Embodied Mind (1991), p. 142

People, World, Feeling, Knowledge

“Perhaps the single most valuable contribution of feminism has been the way it has chipped away at men's fantasies about women. Today it is the destructive woman, consciously or unconsciously intent on controlling, manipulating and exploiting men, who feeds on his regressive, pathetic desire to see himself as the dominant superman. … This hostile attitude was well expressed by one woman who responded with the following comment to a survey on attitudes and experiences regarding the roles of men and women in our society. She wrote:"[If men learn that women are superior] we'll be stuck with a lot of sniveling little boys clinging to our skirts. It's better to let them think they're king of the castle, lean and depend on them, and continue to control and manipulate them as we always have."A man is in jeopardy if he fails to realize that the "fragile," "passive" women of today is not "feminine" but repressed, and may well emerge as the angry woman of tomorrow who will turn the tables on him at a time when he may hardly be prepared or equipped to adapt to the changes. Such is the price of refusing to recognize what is.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

He and His Changes, pp. 188–189
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, Hostility, Way

“There was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the needle to the pole or like two objects in electric experiments.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

As quoted in Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1984), by William A. DeGregorio, pp. 19–20

“Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“English Aphorists,” pp. 102-103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Fashion, Light

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

Love, Life, Women, People

“It is difficult to analyse the motive that induced me to make those journeys, or the satisfaction I derived from such a life. There was of course the lure of the unknown; there was the constant test of resolution and endurance. Yet those travels in the Empty Quarter would have been for me a pointless penance but for the comradeship of my Bedu companions. All they possessed were their camels and saddlery, their rifles and daggers, some waterskins and cooking pots and bowls, and the very clothes they wore; few of them even owned a blanket. They possessed, however, a freedom which we, with all our craving for possessions, cannot experience. Any of them could have found a job in the towns and villages of the Hadhramaut; but all would have rejected that easier life of lesser men. They met every challenge, every hardship, with the proud boast: 'We are Bedu.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 398.

Life, Men, Travel, Motivation

“My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

In 'On a Clear Day', 1973; as quoted by Julie Warchol on website Smith College Museum of Art https://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/Cunningham-Center/Blog-paper-people/Agnes-Martin-On-a-Clear-Day, <br class="br">1970's

Art

“Millions of people profess knowledge of the reality of God, claiming miracles witnessed or voices heard. If what really causes them to believe that they know of God’s existence (and that they have had these experiences) is an unconscious, infantile wish for the protection of an all-powerful father-figure, then we have reason to wonder about the epistemic status of their belief.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

God, People, Knowledge, Reality

“When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment, (…) Don’t be afraid, don’t resist, don’t delay. Be what you are. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly. Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Present moment
Source: I am That, P.140.

Life, Effort, Appearance, Chance

“In my opinion a system of operations, to be efficient and successful, should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematical. The fact that dividends are earned without such control, does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management.
It may be proper here to remark, that in consequence of that want of adaptation before alluded to, we cannot avail ourselves to any great extent of the plan of organization of shorter lines in framing one for this, nor have we any precedent or experience upon which we can fully rely in doing so. Under these circumstances, it will scarcely be expected that we can at once adopt any plan of operations which will not require amendment and a reasonable time to prove its worth. A few general principles, however, may be regarded as settled and necessary in its formation, amongst which are:”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856)

History, Nature, Time, Success

“I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 2

World, Thinking, Tear

“Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 28

“You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Galileo's Dream

Source: Galileo's Dream (2009), Ch. 20, p. 513–514

People, Sense, Learning, Help

“The Ryan White Care Act provides money for community-based counseling centers. While that may sound noble and compassionate, we know from experience that "AIDS education" becomes a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents and lure teens into a self-destructive sexual lifestyle.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Concerned Women for America press release
2010-09-15
Christine O'Donnell Does Not Like Gays.
Instaputz
http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-does-not-like-gays.html
2010-10-20

Money, Education, Communication

“Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.””

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

Appearance, Time

Quotes about experiment page 33

Quotes about experiment
page 33