Quotes about Experience

Such an image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.

I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don't know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience.

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity is right here and now is the function of life.

The course of life in unpredictable, no one can write his autobiography in advance.

The course of life is unpredictable... no one can write his autobiography in advance.

And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.

As a pastor, I've spent 30 years talking to people and heard every kind of story imaginable.

For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.

I didn't know other children from divorced families, and I was a bit of a lost soul for a while. Then suddenly, I was performing. And it gave me an identity.

I don't really like being with people my own age for long periods, because all we talk about is our decrepitude, how the world is changing for the worse even though it isn't.