Quotes about Experience

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.

Our most immediate experience of things is necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter – of tension, communication, and commingling. From within the depths of this encounter, we know the thing or phenomenon only as our interlocutor – as a dynamic presence that that confronts us and draws us into relation. We conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenomenon only by mentally absenting ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies.

If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged. To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.

The animate earth – this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

In a railroad car at nightfall, when the natural light outside has diminished until it is even with the artificial light inside, the passenger facing forward sees in his window two images at once: the dim landscape rushing toward him out of a pit of darkness, and the interior of the car, reflected with its more or less motionless occupants. At this hour most passengers unconsciously give allegiance to one of these two polarities of vision; and the individual momentarily aware of both may be struck by the profound, almost tragic duality between outer and inner worlds, between the rush of experience and the immobility of awareness.

The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an intense and universally sought-after experience is that it seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state.

Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience. Taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them.

True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. 

Remember that nothing has to change in the world for us to transform our own life experience.

The interpretation and experience of  spirituality and religion both depend on the person that is interacting with them. 

    What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

"Every experience in your life is an opportunity to love"
~Rich German

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed…

My needs are to experience some experience everyday.

... you can either ask the question

or experience the answer ...

Every experience is a lesson. Every loss is a gain

Internet is a dimension of experience of the mind, soul, body, and energy. It is not something virtual which "does not exist".
It is just another dimension of experience where is possible to
manifest.

When you can just sit, having the experience you have, whatever it is, without comparing it to what it should be, you will have true peace.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of all true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.  It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.  A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity;  in this sense, and, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

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

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

The experience of loving is very much a direct response to the experience of being loved

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Love is an experience, where we surrender ourselves to the world and to one person in particular, and completely unselfishly choose to enjoy the world around us.

It is not what happens to you or for you that makes you grateful. It's how you respond to what is happening, that shows your belief about gratitude

I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure that you can be fairly sure that there is absolutely nothing you can be sure of.  If you take the time to think about it all, you start to realize that absolutely everything we experience might not even be real.  For instance, it is actually possible that our thoughts might not be entirely our own.  Our words have no absolute meaning.  In example, when someone mentions the color green it can be assumed that everyone would think of a green color but it can also be assumed that they are not all thinking of the same shade of green.  Any time you come to a conclusion about something you are probably wrong or at least not entirely correct.  Why else would there be so many varying philosophies, religions and social concepts and always more to come.  It can be assumed that we can't know everything about everything for sure.