An Experience Quotes

My understanding of God is an experience. God is. That's all I know. In the Biblical tradition, it would be expressed as, "Be still and know that I am God." God is the "I am" energy. Something huge is at play here - cosmic creativity, consciousness, God, whatever you want to call it. I do believe that it's a guided ride. We're on a guided tour of the universe. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Socrates refused to neatly define the self he had in mind, just as Buddha refused to use a word like "God." Their reasons were the same: it defeats the truth to use words, since words imply that you know what you are looking for. Instead, truth is an experience. It cannot be anticipated, any more than one can anticipate, at age five, what it will be like to go to college, get married, have children. Experience is fresh and new (or should be); thus truth is fresh and new. From there, it's a small step to demanding that God be fresh and new. ~ Deepak Chopra

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices. ~ Daniel M. Gilbert

Poems 1959-2009_

I turn into the man they photograph.
I think I'll ask him for his autograph.
He's older than I am and more distinguished.
The beauty of the boy has been extinguished.
He smiles a lot and then not.
Hauteur is the new hot.
He tilts his nose up and looks imperious.
He wants to make sure he looks serious.
He smiles at the photographer but not
The camera. He thinks cold is the look that's hot.
You know the poems. It's an experience.
The way that Shylock is a Shakespearience.
A Jew found frozen on the mountain at the howling summit,
Immortally preserved singing to the dying planet from it. ~ Frederick Seidel

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. ~ Anne Thaxter Eaton

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet ~ Fernando Pessoa

A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself. ~ B.F. Skinner

There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle. ~ Audre Lorde

Personality Self/ Ego Spiritual Self /Higher Soul/God Not recognizing the divinity in yourself or others Recognizing divinity in self and all living things Seeing yourself as separate from everything Knowing you are connected to everything Focuses on differences Recognizes similarities Intellect (Mind) Intuition (Heart) Hostility Compassion Re-Action Responding with awareness Past or Future Fully in the present moment Fear (false evidence appearing real) Courage Judgment Acceptance Right/Wrong Everything is an experience to learn from, both negative and positive. Better/Worse Everything has value. ~ Sabrina Reber

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art. ~ Eudora Welty

The past exists not as a factual recounting of what happened, but as an experience that we are constantly recreating in our mind which means we CAN change the past! ~ Bill Crawford

Wittgenstein could not avoid recognizing that "an experience is such that when I prove it to myself I marvel at the existence of the world. And here I am inclined to use phrases such as 'how extraordinary it is that something exists' or 'how extraordinary it is that the world exists.'" This wonder at existence is the condition for an authentic encounter with things and opens up the possibility of knowledge. ~ Marco Bersanelli

Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure ... but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness. ~ Tim Gillespie

Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

A mistake is an experience, choice or concept it is necessary for us to have or make in order to evolve beyond it. Errors can be the launchpad of great ideas. ~ Stewart Stafford

It was many years ago that I got out of a crewtruck in the national forest and ran toward a large glowing object hovering in the darkening Arizona sky. But when I made that fateful choice to leavethe truck, I was leaving behind more than just my six fellow workmen. I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in itsaftermath, that my life would never - could never - be the same again. ~ Travis Walton

A memory begins as an experience that we encode into our brain through our senses. That memory is then stored until we engage in some act of recall or recollection and then it comes back into our conscious awareness. ~ Britt Andreatta

But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living. ~ John Verdon

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. ~ Susan Sontag

The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger. ~ C. G. Jung

I just want to create, and socializing is part of the experience. It might sound crazy, but I don't see myself in the jewelry business. It's an experience. ~ Waris Ahluwalia

Disease is an experience of mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body. Divine Science takes away this physical sense of discord, just as it removes a sense of moral or mental in-harmony. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that has happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realised in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy. ~ Leo Kadanoff

Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we're lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that's, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give andtake, its private parameters of permission and expection. ~ Priya Basil

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. ... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go. ~ Margaret Atwood

Nirvana is not really a physical place, although sometimes I talk about it as if it were. It is not really an experience, although sometimes I mention it as if it was. ~ Frederick Lenz

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens. ~ Natasha Trethewey

One life is but a single act. One body - a garment. One century - a day. One task - an experience. One triumph - an acquisition. One death - a breath of renovation. ~ Andre Luiz Moreira

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written. ~ Julio Cortazar

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. ~ H.L. Mencken

Mood alteration is an ingredient of compulsive/addictive behavior. Addiction has been described as "a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences." Toxic shame has been suggested as the core and fuel of all addiction. Religious addiction is rooted in toxic shame, which can be readily mood-altered through various religious behaviors. One can get feelings of righteousness through any form of worship. One can fast, pray, meditate, serve others, go through sacramental rituals, speak in tongues, be slain by the Holy Spirit, quote the Bible, read Bible passages, or say the name of Yahweh or Jesus. Any of these can be a mood-altering experience. If one is toxically shamed, such an experience can be immensely rewarding. ~ John Bradshaw

One athlete does not make a team.
One singer does not make a band.
One actor does not make an ensemble.
One participant does not make a contest.
One employee does not make a company.

One stroke does not make a portrait.
One word does not make an essay.
One paragraph does not make a thesis.
One note does not make a symphony.
One instrument does not make an orchestra.

One finger does not make a hand.
One toe does not make a foot.
One lip does not make a voice.
One member does not make a body.
One cell does not make a being.

One memory does not make an experience.
One habit does not make a character.
One act does not make a destiny.
One day does not make a year.
One moment does not make a lifetime.

One man does not make a family.
One home does not make a neighborhood.
One clan does not make nation.
One tribe does not make a continent.
One people does not make a world. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand. ~ E. M. Forster

The meaning of a work is not what the author had in mind at some point, nor is it simply a property of the text or the experience of a reader. Meaning is an inescapable notion because it is not something simple or simply determined. It is simultaneously an experience of a subject and a property of a text. It is both what we understand and what in the text we try to understand. ~ Jonathan Culler

I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me. ~ Melissa Febos

Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen. ~ Alan Watts

Mercy is God's loving response to sinners; and mercy is our loving response to others - and to ourselves - in circumstances of need. To this I would add that mercy, as an experience of love, has an unexpected quality - something unforeseen or unanticipated. We talk about mercy when we feel or offer forgiveness, when we find or give help and assistance, but we also speak about "mercy" when we are surprised by good deeds that catch us unawares and transform our lives for the better. ~ Mathew N. Schmalz

I like to think of the word love as a door. If you only look at the door, all you get is an idea about what love is; but if you are willing to move closer to the door, to open it, and to walk on through, you get to have an experience of what love is. To be intimate with love, you have to move beyond words, leave behind self-concepts, empty your mind of learned ideas, stop being so religious, and let yourself dissolve into love. Now we are really getting somewhere. Now, at last, we can stop trying to define love, and we can let ~ Robert Holden

The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity. ~ John Shelby Spong

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence. ~ Samuel R. Delany

While no amount of financial wealth can guarantee an experience of prosperity, it is possible to experience prosperity at almost any level of income, except when we are unable to meet our basic physical needs. ~ Shakti Gawain

There is nothing like wine for conjuring up feelings of contentment and goodwill. It is less of a drink than an experience, an evocation, a spirit. It produces sensations that defy description. ~ Thomas Conklin

You could have an experience with the gift of the Holy Ghost today. You could begin a private prayer with thanks. You could start to count your blessings, and then pause for a moment. If you exercise faith, and with the gift of the Holy Ghost, you will find that memories of other blessings will flood into your mind. If you begin to express gratitude for each of them, your prayer may take a little longer than usual. Remembrance will come. And so will gratitude. ~ Henry B. Eyring

To be honest and truthful in all endeavours is an experience, not a regret ~ Fela Kuti

A man with an experience of God is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. 'I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,' he said. 'I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places. ~ Sherwood Anderson

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable. ~ Herbert Read

In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family's interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual's happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good - not the individual or the family - and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant. ~ Timothy J. Keller

A poem needs understaning through the senses. The point of diving in a lake, is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake; to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery. ~ John Keats

Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos. ~ Ben Okri

Therefore, reincarnation is an experience of the Ego, co-created by its ignorance, by not realizing that what reincarnates in the universe is God (Love) through his Sons, in an infinite multidimensional experience! (If you understand this, you already passed the final exam ~ Ivan Figueroa-Otero

Silence will illuminate you in God ... and deliver you from phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God ... In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then from our very silence is born something that draws us into deeper silence. May God give you an experience of this 'something' that is born of silence ~ Isaac Of Nenevah

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back to sanity. ~ Mary Jane Ward

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over. ~ Michael Dirda

That the language of the poetry of Jamaican music is rastafarian or biblical language cannot simply be put down to the colonizer and his satanic missionaries. The fact is that the historical experience of the black Jamaican is an experience of the most acute human suffering, desolation and despair in the cruel world that is the colonial world ... ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson

Music is an experience. It's alive. Untamable. You can try to plan it out, pin it down, and bend it to your will, but it can't really be done. ~ Caisey Quinn

He had sat numb, repeatedly questioning why his own tumble had been held on the same piton just before the Japanese leader had fallen and ripped it out. A day later he was his normal self again: an experience absorbed, shelved in his memory, understood and accepted, and left at that. ~ Joe Simpson

I'm interested in connecting with readers and strangers through poetry. I want to create real intimacy with my poems. Whether I do that through pulling from my personal life or using my fantasy life - or say history, whether that history is personal history or our collective histories - what's important is that an experience is created. An experience that will hopefully matter to people and feel real. I want my poems to move people and make them want to live their lives, however complicated and impossible those lives may be. I think a poem can speak to the life you currently live but also to the lives you've lived before, the ones to come and also those you've yet to imagine. What else can do that? Not sex or money or other people. ~ Alex Dimitrov

Your abusive partner's cycles of moving in and out of periods of cruelty can cause you to feel very close to him during those times when he is finally kind and loving. You can end up feeling that the nightmare of his abusiveness is an experience the two of you have shared and are escaping from together, a dangerous illusion that trauma can cause. I commonly hear an abused woman say about her partner, "He really knows me," or "No one understands me the way he does." This may be true, but the reason he seems to understand you well is that he has studied ways to manipulate your emotions and control your reactions. At times he may seem to grasp how badly he has hurt you, which can make you feel close to him, but it's another illusion; if he could really be empathic about the pain he has caused, he would stop abusing you for good. ~ Lundy Bancroft

Contemplation, as it has come to be understood in the Christian tradition, is a return to the paradisiacal state of union with God, which brings to fulfillment the redemptive act of Christ. It is the beginning of a level of consciousness, beyond ordinary consciousness, in which one begins to experience the reality of new life, of risen life. It is an experience of union with God and a realization of our oneness with our brothers and sisters. ~ William Shannon

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something. ~ Kiki Smith

In ways I don't entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down. ~ Alexandra Fuller

While testimonies can come as dramatic manifestations, they usually do not. Sometimes people think they need to have an experience like Joseph Smith's vision before they gain testimonies. If we have unrealistic expectations of how, when, or where answers come, we risk missing the answers which come as quiet, reassuring feelings and thoughts that most often come after our prayers, while we are doing something else. These answers can be equally convincing and powerful. ~ Allan F. Packer

Samadhi is perfect absorption to the point where there is no sense of being absorbed, not the consciousness of knowing that you are having an experience. ~ Frederick Lenz

The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and, second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is, itself, the answer. And we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness - not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM". ~ Thomas Merton

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you'll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you'll discover that "adventure" is a decision after the fact - a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can't quite explain. ~ Rolf Potts

From "The Book That Changed My Life":

-"But your journey is never over until you return from it to share with society what you have learned." ~ Robert Ballard

-"We never anticipate being changed by what we read. Such an experience cannot be planned for." ~ Brother Christopher


~ Robert D. Ballard

People quickly look through things and don't sit and experience. That's a problem with artwork, [because] it's more of an experience than something to quickly look at. It takes a while for everything to unveil itself. ~ Ali Banisadr

she is deeply daring
a beautiful assortment
she's an experience
worth fighting for ~ R.H. Sin

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living. ~ William, Saroyan

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself. ~ Martin Buber

An experience like that changes your perspective on life and on the world ~ Mark Shuttleworth

An experience which seeks not to change you, is one not worth having. ~ Xela Ffonrims

I've had a lot of sex in my life. I've had mediocre sex with someone I loved. I've had some pretty spectacular sex with people I didn't even know. I like to try new things, I like to push limits and I love to see a woman come undone. But in all my days, I have never had an experience that was so visually perfect. She is just absolute perfection. ~ Kerry Heavens

I once had a dream, or a vision, and I imagined that dream to be of importance to other people, so I wrote the manuscript and made the film. But it is not until the moment when my dream meets with your emotions and your minds that my shadows come to life. It is your recognition that brings them to life. It is your indifference that kills them. I hope that you will understand; that you when you leave the cinema will take with you an experience or a sudden thought - or maybe a question. The efforts of my friends and myself have then not been in vain ... ~ Ingmar Bergman

(Because Jonah's real story is the one never told: never was he as stupendously happy as during those three days and three nights of eternity. He was granted an experience that women dream of: he lived when he was mature in the adored whale's belly. In real paradise. How does one get there? By disobedience. By passion. Running away.) ~ Helene Cixous

The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it. ~ Augustus Y. Napier

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through. ~ Kevin Hart

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off ... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.' ~ Patricia MacLachlan

College was an experience I'll always cherish. Now I fund a scholarship at my alma mater in my late father's name - he'd laugh to know that it's a science scholarship, when I can barely do math! I also fund a nursing scholarship at the Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota, in the name of my mother, who was a nurse. ~ Diana Palmer

He broke away a little to murmur, 'You're sure about this?'

'I need to feel alive, Mac,' said Simone 'I have to know it . . . I don't need flowers . . . I don't need dinner . . . I don't need romance . . . I need fucked.'

The word had an electric effect on Macandrew, who despite now wanting Simone so badly, still had reservations about the situation – mainly the fear that he was taking advantage of it. He felt the last of them wash away as she uttered the word. He pinned her to the wall and freed himself before reaching under her skirt to push her panties to one side and enter her hard and long. He cupped his hands round her backside and pulled her on to him, matching the thrust of his hips and being exhorted to ever greater efforts by Simone's moans in his ear. 'Christ, I want you,' he gasped.

'Then have me . . .'

The all too brief outcome of such passion left Macandrew holding Simone to him and resting his forehead on the wall as his breathing subsided.

Simone broke the silence. 'Tell me how you feel?' she murmured.

'After a moment's thought, Macandrew said, 'Embarrassed. Dare I ask about you?'

'Fucked,' replied Simone.

Macandrew smiled, feeling such a surge of relief when he saw that Simone was smiling too. She ran the tips of her fingers softly down his cheek. 'Let's go shower,' she said.

Showering together was as gentle an experience as their love-making had been passionate ~ Ken McClure

Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence. ~ John Maeda

I'm tired of having to remind myself that the women who are after me wish only an experience or a reputation and not a lifetime. I'm tired of holding myself back. I'm tired of having to flatten all but the barest hint of affection."
Her breath caught.
"I'm tired," he said, "Of not letting myself fall in love. ~ Courtney Milan

I'm not sure plays tell people anything. I think plays include an audience in an experience that is happening in that moment, and that's the specialness. What people take away has almost as much to do with what they bring as what we do. ~ Anna D. Shapiro

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command. ~ Mark Rothko

To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten. ~ Charles Lindbergh

Nor did these society people add to Elstir's work in their mind's eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or at least to look without discomfort at, Chardin's painting. And yet the older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives they had gradually seen, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what they had supposed must forever remain a "horror" (Manet's Olympia, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins. But we never learn, because we lack the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an experience which has no precedents in the past. ~ Marcel Proust

I didn't want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It's just not what I am. I'm a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I'm uncomfortable with buying an experience. ~ Alec Soth

The purpose of all relationships is to create a sacred context
within which you can express the fullness of who you are.
And who you are is an experience you have before
you enter relationship, not because you did. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I've done so much theater, and yet I never had an experience like 'The Normal Heart.' We could feel the reaction of the audience every night. It was visceral. ~ Jim Parsons

Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives. ~ Matthew Syed

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way. ~ Andre Gide

Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you. ~ Edward Hirsch

It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Some will tell me that I have just described a religious experience. Very well, you may call it what you will. Then, in that language I would say that the young man's religious experience is of such a kind that he finds the religion of his church inadequate to describe, to encompass that kind of experience. The God of the church isn't big enough. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Take every failure as an experience, cause to be successful you need experience. ~ Jonathan Daniels

If you connect with a greater part of yourself, I call it higher self, but that's an experience, and when you do this, knowledge comes in, including intuition, and it's always about, 'What's my heart's sole desire?' ~ James Redfield

A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body. ~ Ruth Reichl

It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society.

If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists - the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: "Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One" (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent?

Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father's sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said:

"Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I ~ D. Todd Christofferson