Quotes about experiment
page 9

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Douglas Adams book Last Chance to See

Source: Last Chance to See

Learning, Funny

“I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.”

Dan Rather (1931) Journalist, Anchor

Hell, Understanding

“I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Shadow

Source: Ender's Shadow

Stupidity

“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

Source: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World

Time, Forgetting

“Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.”

Martha Stout (1953) American psychologist

Source: The Sociopath Next Door

Love

“There are no mistakes in life,
only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only
opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of selfmastery.
From struggle comes strength. Even pain can be a wonderful teacher”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Life, Pain, Learning, Teachers

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

Dead

“In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

“I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.”

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) American Modernist writer, poet and artist

Silence

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

W [ViVa] (1931) LVII

Life, Death, World, Travel

“That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.”

Sarah Vowell book Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Source: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Country

“You need to screw up to learn. You need to experience to create greatness.”

Laurie Faria Stolarz (1972) American writer

Source: Deadly Little Secret

Learning

“Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Variant: Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance
Source: One Day

Love, Passion, Chance

“Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

Education, Reading, Wise

“If you're not reading - with your heart as well as your brain - you will be one stupid grown up. Even worst, you'll be missing out on one of the best experiences you can possibly have. Nowhere will you meet more interesting people than in books.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Christmas Wedding

People, Books, Stupidity, Reading

“In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.”

Mary Roach book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Source: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

“This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Children, Age

“We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Pain

“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

“If you are drawn to the left hand path, it's usually because you've had some kind of life experience that has shocked you, awakened you.”

Nikolas Schreck American musician and writer

Life

“Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

Source: Out of Place

Feeling, Memory, Hurt

“We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

“I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Variant: Because I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.
Source: The Best of Me

Love, People

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

John Steinbeck book The Pearl

Source: The Pearl

Pain, People

“What's up?" I asked.

You tell me," he said. "You were the one about ready to start making out with Adrian."

It was an experiment," I said. "It was part of my therapy."

What the hell kind of therapy are you in?”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Hell, Parting

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Life, Reading

“You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.”

Ann Brashares book My Name is Memory

Source: My Name Is Memory

Love

“Some lessons you learned by the book. Others you learned from cold hard experience. The latter may not be the best way to learn, but it damn well stuck.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: No Place to Run

Books, Way, Learning

“I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.”

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

Life, Learning

“Yet experience has taught me that fate is sometimes cruel and that even a boatload of hope is sometimes not enough.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Fate, Hope

“If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Love, People, Mathematics

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Support, Universe, Personality

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”

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

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Courageous, Life, Courage

“This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Life

“In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Women, Men, Understanding

“life is crap but, every day is an experience”

Sarah Waters The Night Watch

Source: The Night Watch

Life

“One planet, one experiment.” If”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything

“God, he was probably too young to be this old, but life had a way of being about experience, rather than calendar days.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover at Last

Life, God, Way

“But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Love, Truth, Time

“… what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

“I have the benefit of experience which tells me that sulking solves nothing”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

“What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Source: Fraud: Essays

Feeling, Memory, Past

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting

Source: Trainspotting

Life, Death

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”

Anthony Doerr (1973) American writer

Home, Country

“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

Donna Tartt book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

Books, World, Beauty, Home

“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

Beauty, Happiness

“The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Truth, Justice, Sense

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

quote of 1953; as cited in Smithsonian magazine.
Variants:
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí.
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Pleasure

“There is no such thing as a good call at 7 AM. It's been my experience that all calls between the hours of 11 PM and 9 AM are disaster calls.”

Janet Evanovich (1943) Novelist

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Variant trans: Everybody sees what you seem, but few know what thou art.
Ch. 18
Variant: Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are
Source: The Prince (1513)
Context: Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them.

Relationship, Appearance

“I wasn’t a nerd, mind you, but I’d spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I’d had limited experience with social interaction. I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Firefight

People, Youth, Way, Study

“From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalizing, of course.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Variant: When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.
Source: Kafka on the Shore

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”

Dorianne Laux (1952) American poet

Source: The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

Sense

“You're floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience.”

Michael Singer (1945) American landscape architect

Source: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Universe, Happiness

“Yes, I can talk and think at the same time. Most people can, though I suppose you wouldn't know that from personal experience.
Elena (Bitten)”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

People, Thinking, Time, Personality

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

Truth, History, Childhood

“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Soul

“Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Let Me be a Woman

Truth, Feeling

“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Love, Books, Heart

“We just had a near-life experience!”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Variant: We just had a near-life experience
Source: Fight Club

Life

“Deep experience is never peaceful.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

de Mauves http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/mauve10.txtMadame, Galaxy Magazine (February/March 1874), ch. V, reprinted in A Passionate Pilgrim (1875) and later in The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales (1879) and the New York Edition of James' works, vol. 13 (1908).

Peace

“Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: B is for Burglar

Men, People, Personality

“From my experience, honey, if he seems too good to be true—he probably is.”

Candace Bushnell book Sex and the City

Source: Sex and the City

“She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you would never know.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Hope, Game, Time, Hurt

“Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Learning

“Experience is something you get… after you need it.”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: Simply Irresistible

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

Source: In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day: How To Survive And Thrive When Opportunity Roars

God, Business, Past, Future

“A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Imagination

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: The World As I See It

Beauty, Beauty, Art, Science

“What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of
attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Life, Learning

“Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.”

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

Love, People

“Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Yukon Ho!

“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

People, Thinking, Universe, Time

“Most good judgement comes from exprerience, most experience comes from bad judgement”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Variant: Asteros's Motto: "Most experience comes from bad judgement.
Source: Acheron

“Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: 1Q84 BOOK 1

Fools, Reality, Appearance

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Love Bites

Life, Home, Suffering, Teachers

“… love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1

Love, People

“And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it's only a moment's pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time.”

William Kent Krueger book Ordinary Grace

Source: Ordinary Grace

Time, Happiness

“Each experience in your lifewas absolutely necessary in order to have gotten you to the next place, and the next place, up to this very moment.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“WARNING
If you dare to read this story, you become part of the Experiment”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Reading, Parting

“The more connections you and your lover make, not just between your bodies, but between your minds, your hearts, and your souls, the more you will strengthen the fabric of your relationship, and the more real moments you will experience together.”

Barbara De Angelis (1951) American psychologist

Soul, Lovers, Heart

“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

World, Success

“How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

Life, Change, Time

“Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Funny

“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

Source: My Autobiography (p. 271 Simon and Schuster 1964 edition)

Dreams, History

“Absolutely everything you experience in your life is a result of what you have given in your thoughts and feelings, whether you realize you have given them or not.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Power

Source: The Power

Life, Feeling

“It is in the interests of both sexes to hear the other sex's experience of powerlessness.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. xvii.
Context: Was it possible for the sexes to hear each other without saying, My powerlessness is greater than your powerlessness? It was becoming obvious each sex had a unique experience of both power and powerlessness. In my mind's eye I began to visualize a listening matrix as a framework within which we could hear these different experiences. It looked like this:

Sex

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Imagination, Time

“There are mysteries in Everlost. Some of them are wonderful, and others scary. They should all be explored, though- perhaps that's why we're here: to experience the good and the bad that Everlost has to offer.”

Neal Shusterman book Everlost

Source: Everlost

“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin

“When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Living Buddha, Living Christ

Reality

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

Death, Loss, Childhood

“Don’t accumulate possessions; accumulate experiences!”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day: How To Survive And Thrive When Opportunity Roars
Variant: Don’t accumulate possessions, accumulate experiences or vice versa