Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted — and these quotes prove that the lessons of lived experience are impossible to shortcut. They cover wisdom earned the hard way, the value of mistakes, and why secondhand knowledge only gets you so far.
“Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.”
“If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.”
“Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.”
“I had the experience last year of directing my first feature while I had a 1-year-old son and while I was also pregnant, so I am now well aware of the difficulties women who are rearing children face when they're also trying to make headway in mainstream of film.”
“The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.”
“We can not continue to allow this over reliance on government to replace the cornerstone institution that has made the American experience possible.”
“In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.”
“Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.”
“I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.”
“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”
“There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?”
“Mississippi Mermaid was a very special experience because we only had the dialogues for the scenes we were shooting the night before.”
“Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?”
“I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don't have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.”
“Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.”
“Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?”