Common Experience Quotes

It is a common experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We hold in our hands a key to peace on earth, yet it has been overlooked. It is the near-death experience. It must be examined closely by every living human being. The near-death experience offers one common experience, and only one. It is time for the world to embrace this reality and come together in love. ~ April Michelle Lewis

Month by month, year by year, there took shape in Paul's mind a new and lucid image of his world, an image at once terrible and exquisite, tragic and farcical. It is difficult to give an idea of this new vision of Paul's, for its power depended largely on the immense intricacy and diversity of his recent experience; on his sense of the hosts of individuals swarming upon the planet, here sparsely scattered, there congested into great clusters and lumps of humanity. Speaking in ten thousand mutually incomprehensible dialects, living in manners reprehensible or ludicrous to one another, thinking by concepts unintelligible to one another, they worshipped in modes repugnant to one another. This new sense of the mere bulk and variety of men was deepened in Paul's mind by his enhanced apprehension of individuality in himself and others, his awed realization that each single unit in all these earth-devastating locust armies carried about with it a whole cognized universe. On the other hand, since he was never wholly forgetful of the stars, the shock between his sense of human littleness in the cosmos and his new sense of man's physical bulk and spiritual intensity increased his wonder. Thus in spite of his perception of the indefeasible reality of everyday things, he had also an overwhelming conviction that the whole fabric of common experience, nay the whole agreed universe of human and biological and astronomical fact, though real, concealed some vaster reality. ~ Olaf Stapledon

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. ~ Charles Dickens

Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates amongst people who have been up since dawn – of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come. ~ John Le Carre

Our common experience in fact is the opposite - that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we find it has an uncanny habit of returning to hold us hostage. ~ Desmond Tutu

All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. ~ Alain LeRoy Locke

And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Simple exchanges can break down walls between us, for when people come together and speak to one another and share a common experience, then their common humanity is revealed. We are reminded that we're joined together by our pursuit of a life that's productive and purposeful, and when that happens mistrust begins to fade and our smaller differences no longer overshadow the things that we share. And that's where progress begins. ~ Barack Obama

We stared at each other, bound by common experience, but each looking at the other through the steady crosshairs of inherent distrust. ~ David Grant Urban

I never see you now,' she said. 'I never seem to see anyone I like. I don't know why.'
But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. ~ Evelyn Waugh

On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.
This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls who loved their mothers. ~ Arnaud Desplechin

Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared. ~ Don DeLillo

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ... ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause ... True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts. ~ Clarence Darrow

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience. ~ Evelyn Waugh

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy. ~ Evelyn Waugh

There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, "That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults." Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses dualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments. ~ Joseph Addison

It is important to learn from other women. We have a lot to offer and to learn from each other out of our separate and common experience. The sisterhood (including the boilers - the old chooks!) is important to me. The dialogue between women is a rich field, but change does not come without a lot of reading, asking, listening, risk taking and hard work. ~ Hazel Hawke

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Still, as everyone I know who has been through tragedy acknowledges with sadness, there are friends who don't come through as you might hope. A common experience is having friends who decide it's their job o inform grieving pals what they should be doing - and worse, what they should be feeling. A woman I met chose to go to work the day after her husband died because she could not bear to be at home. To this day, she still feels the disapproval of colleagues who said to her, "I'd think yo'd be too upset to be here today." You would think, but you just don't know. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go. ~ John Updike

It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable. ~ Clarice Lispector

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires; ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. It is not at all necessary that every individual symbol that is used should represent something in common experience or even something explicable in terms of common experience. The man in the street is always making this demand for concrete explanation of the things referred to in science; but of necessity he must be disappointed. It is like our experience in learning to read. That which is written in a book is symbolic of a story in real life. The whole intention of the book is that ultimately a reader will identify some symbol, say BREAD, with one of the conceptions of familiar life. But it is mischievous to attempt such identifications prematurely, before the letters are strung into words and the words into sentences. The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

I looked at the people around me and wondered who they were. What made us a family? Certainly not a common experience, as each of us had a different story, and although we shared characters, the villain in mine might be the hero in Wendy's ~ Teri Coyne

Our minds and memories are crowded with the common experience of nature. ~ Sadie Jones

Time is a dream - or a nightmare - from which there is never any waking. We who travel in Time are dreamers who occasionally share a common experience. ~ Michael Moorcock

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape. ~ Gary Burton

But common sense is deceptive precisely because it is based on common experience. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

The way to become that exciting person whom people want to know is very easy. We simply picture the kind of person we want to be and surrender all the negative feelings and blocks that prevent us from being that. What happens, then, is that all we need to have and to do will automatically fall into place. This is because, in contrast to having and doing, the level of being has the most power and energy. When it is given priority, it automatically integrates and organizes one's activities. This mechanism is evidenced in the common experience, What we hold in mind tends to manifest. ~ David R. Hawkins

What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other: I know a healer for you. I'll hold your hand in the dark. Let's begin a meditation practice. Perhaps talk therapy is not enough. We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be -- I know we are all in need of healing -- so how are we doing our healing work? ~ Adrienne Maree Brown

Assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain. ~ Robert Adams

If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage. ~ Shane Black

Over the past two generations, 48 percent of all African American families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in each generation. The most common experience for black families since the 1970s, by a wide margin, has been to live in the poorest American neighborhoods over consecutive generations. Only 7 percent of white families have experienced similar poverty in their neighborhood environments for consecutive generations. By contrast, persistent neighborhood advantage is virtually nonexistent for black families. One out of every one hundred black families in the United States has lived in affluent neighborhoods over the past two generations, compared to roughly one out of five white families. ~ Patrick Sharkey

In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely. ~ Charles Baxter

It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. ~ Jean H. Baker

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~ John Steinbeck

I have a tremendous belief in people, not that people don't let me down, not that I haven't maybe let some people down. But I have a tremendous belief in people and in the common experience. ~ Kevin Costner

I think the common experience is that modern shamans are called by the spirits; we just don't have a collective belief system or community that recognizes the calling for what it is. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world. ~ Mary Balogh

If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are. ~ Austin Kleon

Yuvali struggled to put one foot in front of the other. The long leaves of a purple-flowered bush raked her forehead. The flower emerged from bulbous green tubes, unfolding toward the sun. The petals radiated like flecks in an eye, a whirlpool, a sea-shell." Ch.19 ~ B.T. Lowry

My message to Washington is the United States has gone through incredible crises, and our leaders have been able to find common ground. And that's what our leaders have to do. ~ Kenneth Chenault

In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.*
*This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people. ~ Terry Pratchett

Maintaining a long-distance relationship requires a lot of discipline," surmised Duncan. "The loneliness that they experience is a formidable force to be reckoned with, and not everyone can withstand it. A physical entity is always more powerful than a voice distorted by static, more so when they encounter problems and want to share them with their partner in real time. In such cases, they usually turn to a third party, and that's when the relationships fall apart like a house of cards. ~ Alexis Lawrence

Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. ~ Frederick Buechner

When you are grounded in the present - feeling your feelings, listening to your body, tasting your food, and expressing your ideas - you do not build up toxicity. You digest your experience as you go. ~ Debbie Ford

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience. ~ Rachel Kushner

God is not something I think about but something I experience as an energy, a Presence. I do find it easier to pray to a female Presence or an androgynous Presence. ~ Olympia Dukakis

In some movies you feel like you're a very small part of a huge machine. Whereas in the theater you can have a very small part, but you can still feel the weight and the gravity of it. Given the nature of theater, it's a more concentrated and quiet experience. ~ Minnie Driver

The experience of time translates itself into language, and language translates itself into distance, which translates itself into longing, which is the realization of time. (…) how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier or the signifier of a sign, moreover, the sign of a signifier searching for the signifies. ~ Jenny Boully

Life (as you call it) is an opportunity for you to know experientially what you already know conceptually. You need learn nothing to do this. You need merely remember what you already know, and act on it. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

We have chocolate in common – that's enough. ~ Rachel Hollis

May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers! ~ Albert Einstein

Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment. ~ John Dewey

An experience that changes nothing is hardly worth having. ~ Martin Margiela

Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came. ~ John Mark Reynolds

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared. ~ Anne Bronte

The Lord's holy fire lit my path. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature ~ Virginia Woolf

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances. ~ Andrew Motion

You cannot tell how it is, until you experience it. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As cyberspace matures into a totally immersive experience, I'm betting it will turn out to be fully odor-enabled. ~ Charles Platt

Two demons: one who insists that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience; and one who 'insists that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience. ~ Nanamoli Thera

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market. ~ Charlie Munger

If we don't accept any common beliefs, we can't exist in spacetime. But when we don't believe in age, at least we don't have to die because our numbers change. [ ... ] When you don't believe in birthdays, the idea of aging turns a little foreign to you. You don't fall into trauma over your sixteenth birthday or your thirtieth or the big Five-Oh or the deadly Century. You measure your life by what you learn, not by counting how many calendars you've seen. If you're going to have trauma, better it be the shock of discovering the fundamental principle of the universe that some date predictable as next July. ~ Richard Bach

The last time I read piles of erotica by choice, I was fourteen. At that stage, having no experience with men beyond snogging, I took it all as gospel. Now, after I've lived a little, I read the same works again and think, 'Has this author ever really had sex? ~ Fiona Pitt-Kethley