life experience Quotes

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”

“It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”

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

“Act as if! Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and then you’ll surely become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and then people will surely have confidence in you. Act as if you have unmatched experience and then people will follow your advice. And act as if you are already a tremendous success, and as sure as I stand here today - you will become successful!”

“Adams […] told me that he recognized these innocent-looking puffs of water vapor to be the crowns of robust thunderheads.”

“They won’t be human experiences afterward. You don’t get a second chance at humanity, Bella.”

“I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not one-hundred-percent anything.”

“Then I went on, and my feet seemed to be a long way off, and everything seemed to come from a long way off, and I could hear my feet walking a great distance away.”

“Most of us become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience.”

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

“Based on her experience with men, most assumed that when you talked to them about a problem or dilemma, they were expected to offer an opinion, even when all you wanted was for them to listen.”

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“I possess the most valuable experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.”

“You know how it is: you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you’re seventy: you’ve been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you.”

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”

“We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.”

“My whole life has been one prolonged hunt.”

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it’s complicated.”

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

“Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.”

“One day can bend your life...”

“In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

“I’m learning that everything doesn’t always come back the way you send it. Sometimes, love is more brick and less boomerang.”

“The inner, the essential line of our fate consists of such invisible experiences. Such fissures and rents consists of such invisible experiences. Such fissures and rents grow together again, heal and are forgotten, but in the most secret recesses they continue to live and bleed.”

“Once you jump, God will take it from there. He will place you in positions to learn important lessons that will prepare you for the next stage of your life—your next jump.”

“If the thought of lack – whether it be money, recognition, or love – has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. Rather than acknowledge the good that is already in your life, all you see is lack.”

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

“No matter what you’ve experienced remember this: There are people who’ve had it better than you and done worse. And there are people who’ve had it worse than you and done better. ”

“My parents found a lovely place in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. [...] This beautiful place became my real discovery of nature. My emphasis on biology and nature and the body in my writing about myth comes out of those years.”

Instead of being stories of hope for children, I suspect their massive appeal lies in the fact they are really wildly-nostalgic stories for adults about how broken childhoods (and sometimes even broken adulthoods) should have been.

This is a great story about parents not listening to their daughter and said daughter saving their home. It also has wolves...in the walls! It is just the kind of story that should be read aloud, too, full of the rhythms and repeated refrains that fit with oral story telling.

“They became the closest possible friends. They told each other about their lives, their ambitions. They shared their deepest secrets with each other. The whale was very curious about life on land and was very sorry that he could never experience it. Amos was fascinated by the whale’s accounts of what went on deep under the sea.”

″...Ronia had seen little more than this during her short life. She knew nothing of what lay outside Matt’s Fort. And one fine day Matt realized- however little he liked it- that the time had come. ‘Lovis,’ he said to his wife, ‘our child must learn what it’s like living in Matt’s Forest. Let her go!‘”

“The world is in need of a practical, understandable philosophy of achievement, organized from the factual knowledge gained from the experience of men and women in the great university of life.”

“The circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How should anyone coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?”

“It’s okay to wear the scars of experience.”

“The news became known. I had spent weeks at work, studying, correlating statis­tics, going through reports, none of which actually help to reveal the truth of what it is like to be discriminated against. They cancel truth almost more than they reveal it. I decided to throw them away and simply publish what happened to me.”

“So much of the pain I’ve experienced in my life has been tied to love. To love is to accept pain, to take it in, to grow from it, and to love again.”

“Jock had many things to learn besides the lessons he got from me- the lessons of experience which nobody could teach him.”

“Tiggers don’t like haycorns.” “But you said they liked everything except honey,” said Pooh. “Everything except honey and haycorns,” explained Tigger.

“And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”

“I have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive minister, “that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves.”

“Suppose you learn plain cooking. That’s a useful accomplishment, which no woman should be without,” said Mrs. March, laughing inaudibly at the recollection of Jo’s dinner party, for she had met Miss Crocker and heard her account of it.

“Pain, thou art not an evil.”

This wasn’t a world in which a man had any business with a family; sooner or later Jurgis would find that out also, and give up the fight and shift for himself.

Only ole Ham standin’ by, passin’ plates—damfican eat like that, no sir! The club for me every time, my boy, I say. But then they won’t lemme sleep there—guv’ner’s orders, by Harry—home every night, sir!”

The past, like the country through which we walk, becomes indistinct as we advance. My position is like that of a person wounded in a dream; he feels the wound, though he cannot recollect when he received it.

Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man, who, like Satan, thought himself for an instant equal to God, but who now acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom. Perhaps those prayers may soften the remorse he feels in his heart. As for you, Morrel, this is the secret of my conduct towards you. There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.

I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to patronise me.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again.

They were emptying his room out; taking away everything that was dear to him; they had already taken out the chest containing his fretsaw and other tools; now they threatened to remove the writing desk with its place clearly worn into the floor, the desk where he had done his homework as a business trainee, at high school, even while he had been at infant school—he really could not wait any longer to see whether the two women’s intentions were good.

They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other’s career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.

Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good.

Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.