Personal Experience Quotes

“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“All of our thoughts – ideas – are traceable to a sensation, an encounter with the world that leaves an impression upon the mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“At sixty one, I was at the top of my professional career, a wife, mother, and grandmother with many wonderful friends--and absolutely terrified....I was unaware of living as multiple identifies, but did spend my life running away from a 'me' I could neither understand nor tolerate....The first step to becoming one whole person happened to me the day in therapy when I became aware of the three adults who had been living in separate compartments in my brain. I saw them and they saw each other....A perfect three-point landing.”
― Janyne McConnaughey, Brave : A Personal Story of Healing Childhood Trauma

“Until I met Rob, I thought, Relationships are miserable. Relationships are hard. But there are things about relationships that make them worth it. Now, I see that I was completely fucking wrong. You should expect to be happy every day. Anyone who says marriage is hard might need to see someone. My marriage is the easiest thing in my life. Other things are hard, and the thing that makes everything easier is my marriage. That’s not to say that a marriage is without challenges, but hard should not be your general state.”
― Tan France, Naturally Tan

“The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Personal experiences that disrupt stale routines result in the phenomena of cognitive dissiliency, jolting our minds and enhancing our ability to internalizing new information.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Reveal to the people and make them experience God first before you make them church members”
― Sunday Adelaja

“I do not allow anybody to hurt me without my permission, because, I believe in no expectations, no disappointments, no hurting myself, just being me and my imaginative self. Trust me because, when I have expectations, I am setting myself up for disappointment.”
― Muhammad Usman Aman

“Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Does a person employ their cache of personal experiences to guide how they live or do they plot their life course based exclusively upon their ideas? How does a person associate personal experiences with ideas? Can a personal experience ever portray the profundity of an idea? Does an idea express what sentiment we can never equate to an actual personal experience; is an idea by its very nature characterized precisely by the fact that no sensation of experience is ever fully congruous to it?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“This is the law of life, its real meaning, that we cannot impose our experience on other people, or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience do we understand life.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“First of all, nothing good ever came from a beanbag chair. Nothing. I am speaking from personal experience.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“We live in a world of shadow and light, pain and joy. We spend our entire lives investigating the many possible patterns of human experience including interactions between humankind and nature and with one another. We must learn from our chronicles and assist future generations by living a fully engaged life attempting to ascertain how to live in an authentic and joyous manner.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The most legitimate experience to be shared is the personal experience”
― Giharu Si Perempuan Gunung

“I do not allow anybody to hurt me without my permission, because, I believe in no expectations, no disappointments, no hurting myself, just being me and my imaginative self. Trust me because, when I have expectations, I am setting myself up for disappointment.”
― Usman Aman

“If you know how
You do not need to know where...”
― Петър Кръстев Petur Krustev

“What we depend upon for happiness and a sense of fulfillment is reflective of our self-giving character forged through a variety of evocative experiences.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our limitations on this planet are only determined by our earthly vehicles, our physical bodies. We exist only in the present. And this knowing, which we can gain only through personal experience, is our ultimate spiritual security.”
― Jozef Simkovic, How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny

“Don’t contemplate my maturity with my attitude – mental outlook, because very occasionally I used to behave as like I’m not growing up but in fact just coming of the age.”
― Raj-Koochitani

“The past should never serve as an encumbrance, but we must exploit our experiences as learning assets. The only importance of any experience is to test oneself. Worthy challenges, fused with humility of spirit, enrich a person’s character. One must harvest the grain from their effort and discard the shaft. Before moving onward, it is critical for me to look back and remove any negative predilections that accumulated from days gone by that might mar, stunt, or otherwise arrest future personal development.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A person can learn beneficial information from books, but they can only acquire wisdom from living a fully engaged life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The defining background experiences of our childhood affect our vital adulthood decisions and method of apprehending the world.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our limitations on this planet are only determined by our earthly vehicles, our physical bodies. We exist only in the present. And this knowing, which we can gain only through personal experience, is our ultimate spiritual security, by Jozef.”
― Jozef Simkovic, How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny

“Our genetic map makes us human. Our physical and emotional genomes establish the baseline for us to operate. When we strike out in the world, we seek out vivid encounters with other people and nature that speak loudest to ourselves. What we make of our brilliant experiences modulates who we become. The way we think, feel, and express emotions enables us to personalize our experiences.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“If, on the other hand, you insist on your knowledge of the emperor's nakedness, you may not find the ready assent from others which could confidently be expected only if you assume their good faith toward their own experience; In fact, their strenuous denial that they share your experience may leave you in such isolation that ultimately not only they but you yourself begin to question your sanity.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person’s life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worthy of a mature spirituality.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We look for reliable witnesses who are to be found only in the Church whose age-old experience is immeasurably richer and more profound than our individual one. Such in the distant past were the apostles who bequeathed to us in gospel and epistle the knowledge which they had received direct from God. They were followed by a succession of fathers (doctors and ascetics) who handed down the centuries, above all, the spirit of life itself, often endorsing their testimony in writing. We believe that at any given historical moment it is possible to find living witnesses; to the end of time mankind will never be bereft of genuine gnosis concerning God. Only after authoritative confirmation may we trust our personal experience, and even then not to excess. Our spirit ought not to slacken in its impulse towards God. And at every step it is essential to remember that self-confident isolation is fraught with the possibility of transgressing against Truth. So we shall not cease to pray diligently to the Holy Spirit that He preserve our foot from the paths of untruth.”
― Sophrony Sakharov, His Life Is Mine

“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives