Quotes about Experience

Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.

In forming a judgment of ourselves now, Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day…. There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence…. The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.

These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But

Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interiour world which otherwise would be an empty waste.

It's not what you're faced with that's the problem, it's what you do with the situation. Your experience is not the important thing; what really matters is what you do with your experience.

To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they've known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is.

Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life