From My Own Experience Quotes & Sayings

From my personal experience as an analyst and dance choreographer working in the midst of "conflict", I do not think that, in a situation of oppression, intellectuals have a choice of whether or not to reflect the impact of conflict on them and on their society. Oppression, in a way, forces itself upon their work, their creative process. Their basic choice seems to be, then, whether to passively reflect it, or to actively transcend it. Oppression, it seems, has its own way of touching everyone within its reach, irrespective of one's actual involvement in it or will to get involved in it. — Omar Barghouti

His kiss sent sensation from the tip of my tongue all the way to my knees, and I let my weight fall against him as I met his probing tongue with my own. I wanted to be closer, to absorb all of him, to experience the shimmery feeling flowing through my veins for as long as possible. — Mia Sheridan

There is no other labor in all the world that brings to a human heart, judging from my own personal experience, more joy, peace and serenity than proclaiming the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ — Heber J. Grant

My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can come about only through direct experience, the way a severe burn can be attained only by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else's insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of secondhand clothing, worn-out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there's only one real source of wisdom - pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis. — Damien Echols

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. — Kay Redfield Jamison

From my own personal experience I have consistently witness self-proclaimed Christians, get angry over insignificant issues, be unforgiving, and judgmental all while never looking in the mirror and proclaiming to the world their love for the lord. If I were not already a Christian I would have questioned the faith due to the representatives. — Carl Henegan

From my experience, I think that every actor has to make sure that they're in charge of their own career somehow or other. — Alan Rickman

Let my daughter remember that in view of her age she should always help her brother with the advice that her greater experience and her affection may suggest, and let them both remember that in whatever situation they may find themselves they will never be truly happy unless united. Let them learn from our example how much consolation our affection has brought us in the midst of our unhappiness and how happiness is doubled when one can share it with a friend - and where can one find a more loving and truer friend than in one's own family? — Melanie Clegg

The evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. Most are not. It's clear from the Opinion Polls and my own experience, that indeed most people accept the notion that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft. The greater the education, the MORE likely to accept this proposition — Stanton T. Friedman

The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing - I am just beginning to realize - may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go. — Christian Wiman

I know from my own experience that you've got to be ready on day one. There is just too much unpredictable threat and danger in the world today to try to just say wait, I'll get to that when I can. That is just not an acceptable approach. — Hillary Clinton

The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it. — Paul Newman

From my own experience I can say that a bad back makes you hike slower, stove-up knees keep you from wading confidently, tendinitis of the elbows buggers your casting, and a dose of giardia can send you dashing to the bushes fifteen times in an afternoon, but although none of this is fun, it's discernibly better than not fishing. — John Gierach

I learned, viscerally, something that I knew intellectually: that I cannot protect my daughter from the difficulties as she may encounter in her search for her own identity, and that she will be OK. She has a sisterhood to share the experience with, in addition to her family. — Linda Goldstein Knowlton

Those who, either from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reach, have from that time not only ceased to advance, and improve in their performances, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men who have lived upon their principal, till they are reduced to beggary, and left without resources. — Joshua Reynolds

In certain cases I don't want to sell tracks individually; I want to only sell the whole album. With simple things like that I just don't get any response [from iTunes]. I don't want to kill iTunes - I just want to offer my own retail experience in my own tiny corner of the Internet. — DJ Shadow

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where? — Philip Yancey

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life - or at least the part my work played in it - I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life. — Philip Levine

Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours. — Donna Tartt

I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience. — Christopher Nolan

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. — James Lee Burke

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows. — Jeanette Winterson

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is — Sam Harris

It has been observed that I show hardly any interest in talking about myself. It is hard for me to disentangle my own person from the social processes, the ideas and activities in which it has shared, which matter more than it does and which give it value. I do not think of myself as at all an individualist: rather as a 'personalist', in that I view human personality as a supreme value, only integrated in society and history. The experience and thought of one man have no significance that deserves to last, except in this sense. — Victor Serge

Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves...if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. — Kallistos Ware

They were tales of commonplace courage and optimism, for I knew from my own experience that everyday virtues endure best, and that quiet courage is worth more than the grandest derring-do. — Nancy Atherton

I'm really happy in my own skin. There's a lot of judgment that can come from outside sometimes, and there's media scrutiny that is placed on a lot of women in the public eye, and I just couldn't care less. I really couldn't care less. 'I would sometimes say in my twenties, 'oh, I couldn't care less', but I think I probably did. Now I genuinely don't and that's a lovely, liberating thing to experience. — Kate Winslet

From my own experience, there are so many people who believe that the individual can change. The individual doesn't have to be LGBT. — Tim Gunn

From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head's all misshapen and pointy, and you say, "Son, you were born with talent. — Pete Dexter

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them
And to know that they are the wounds that make love real.
His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again
I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too
and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality. — James Kavanaugh

The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own. — Molly Antopol

I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing. — Sally Hawkins

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

I do not believe that there is any secret or single formula for success, but there are common threads of thought and action that characterize the successful people that I have been fortunate enough to know and observe. I do know, from my own experience, that our chance of succeeding is much greater when we organize and take charge of our lives. When we are willing to make decisions, we aggressively pursue those things in life that are important to us. — Merlin Olsen

By default I am the good parent. I've used my own personal experience. I came from a world where I was in need and starving for the good parent, so it's like I'm bringing my own persona issues into that. I am the parent that I always wanted to have; that's how I look at my role. — Bob Harper

experience, and most of those experiences are painful and costly. If you can learn from someone else's pain and expense, you are a wise person, indeed. I would encourage you to read this book, cover-to-cover, but also keep it as a reference text using the sections and individual columns as a resource you can revisit as your life journey calls for specific wisdom. It is my hope that this is not a one-time encounter that you and I are having. My hope is, in the coming months and years as you travel toward your own personal — Jim Stovall

I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT. — Andrei Tarkovsky

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. — Henry David Thoreau

From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team's lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity - people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission. — Richard Branson

Crisis and my experience of Punk Rock in Britain/Europe was anything and everything but "fun" and this sort of idea comes from people who were either not there at the time, or were and have an axe of some kind or another to grind about their own experiences with Crisis. The years between 1977 and 1980 were some of the hardest of my Life and they certainly contributed to Tony and I wanting to destroy the group in 1980 and head for sunnier pastures artistically, culturally, and whatever else we could find. — Douglas Pearce

Solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way I'm aware of this danger - probably through experience - and that's why I've had to constantly keep my body in motion, in some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction. — Haruki Murakami

Very often (nearly always, I'm afraid) when I come to church my feelings are uppermost in my mind. This is natural. We are human, we are "selves," and it takes no effort at all to feel. But worship is not feeling. Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship "in spirit and in truth." Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them. Finding myself scattered in all directions and in need of corralling like so many skittish calves, I kneel before the service begins and ask to be delivered from a vague preoccupation with myself and my own concerns and to be turned, during this short hour, to God. — Elisabeth Elliot

Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself ... " Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs. — William Voegeli

Knowledge is the wisdom of one passing on the accumulation of their experience to others. — Michael Hanson

True wisdom
is not borrowed knowledge
it must be based
on my own experience.

That which I learn from others
is memory, not wisdom — Beopjeong

For me, I can only do that from my own experience with people I've known and things that I've lived and experienced. That's what good pop music is all about, pop music that does reach out to people. It's very personalized and very real, honest and sincere. — Jon Secada

Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free. — Rita Mae Brown

I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average person's. 'A Brief Encounter with the Enemy' was created by taking bits and pieces from here and there, and then putting my own spin on them. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

Although I speak from my own experience, I feel that no one has the right to impose his or her beliefs on another person. I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable for you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama — Dalai Lama XIV

My father's life was so decimated by his earliest experiences. His mother died when he was 7 years old, which he always said was the worst experience in his life. When he was 8, his father disappeared and he was on his own from the age of 8. — Walter Mosley

I try to live with few rules, but one that I've adopted over the years is this: if it's down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I'm the one who's screwed up. I have learned this from experience. I have been the asshole acting out based on my own insecurities and flawed certainties more times than I can count. It's not pretty. — Mark Manson

Imagine if you would, what would happen to your sorrows and fears if God Himself, the maker of heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord, the sovereign One, were to come to you, wrap you in His almighty arms and say to you, 'I love you with a perfect love, exactly as I love My Son. I will never stop loving you, no matter what. I am completely, utterly for you. I promise, on My own life, that I will do you good every day of your life. And because I control all things, that means My good is all you will ever experience from this time forward.' — R.C. Sproul Jr.

of Jesus Christ and my relationship to Him and remember that the One who created the universe can do anything. I also have evidence - my own experience - that God can do anything, because He changed me. From age 14, I began to focus on the future. My mother's lessons - and those of several of my teachers - were at last paying off. — Ben Carson

It's been a hard lesson for me , but contrary quite frankly to what is a common practice in politics, I can tell from my own experience, it is better to stay away from personalities. — George W. Bush

I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.
As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.
> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67 — Milton Friedman

Besides, I was myself the one who spoke to me. I sat and stood at the same time, hushed and spoke and formed two persons from my own alone. It was, wasn't it, as if with the greatest levity and astonishing velocity thinkable one stood up from where one sat to stand speaking to the person one was a moment before and now no longer was, and yet remained that person still, because one is seeing oneself in imagination, which enriches life, which I employ as often as I want or can or may, which throws me off balance and always restores it, which is the continuous emotion for the sake of which I always and never go too far, which as today for instance, multiplies me or at least doubles me now and then, which is strange and is pleasurable and keeps me active and therefore rejuvenated and foolish, so that one can experience being pleasured alive, so that it won't be all too self-evident, and not too lonesome, either. — Robert Walser

It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness like you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor — Andrew Solomon

I'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything I could to tailor it to the artist I was working with. — David Finch

I find it hard to work with other musicians because I know from experience that when they play, they play with their feeling, and that restricts me because I know I want to play in my own particular way. — Enya

In my own experience, both personally and professionally, I've learned that you don't wait to confront reality. It doesn't get easier. It doesn't get better. And, in some cases, if you don't get the relevant information from people and act quickly, you start losing options. You're into damage control. — Stephen Covey

I only know from my own personal experience, and I personally feel that there's a cyclical nature to things, so you don't want to start making generalizations about how bad things have become in comparison to the old days. — Jeffrey Jones

I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful to try to do so. In a word, I have conscience as well as fear of gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable mental surroundings! But always without success. — Aldous Huxley

You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience — Marilynne Robinson

About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful. — Billy Corgan

My attitude about teaching has always been the same. From early on, I wanted to make yoga accessible so that anyone, regardless of ability, could experience its wonder, joy, and power. I encourage students to question, learn, and develop their own personal practice. — David F. Swensen

At one time in my infancy I also knew no Latin, and yet by listening I learnt it with no fear or pain at all, from my nurses caressing me, from people laughing over jokes, and from those who played games and were enjoying them. I learnt Latin without the threat of punishment from anyone forcing me to learn it. My own heart constrained me to bring its concepts to birth, which I could not have done unless I had learnt some words, not from formal teaching but by listening to people talking; and they in turn were the audience for my thoughts. This experience sufficiently illuminates the truth that free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. — Augustine Of Hippo

A lot of people think that in order to be attractive, you need to appear cool, together or confident. But REAL confidence comes from accepting yourself as you are, and sharing the real you. When you share you do so simply in the interest of being transparent and not trying to get a certain favorable response. Letting go of trying to control other peoples' responses to you is one of the greatest confidence-builders I know of. And from my own experience, I have come to the conclusion that I am most lovable when I am most transparent. — Susan Campbell

No wonder everyone is keen to put their feet up and let Fate look after them. It's rather like your granddad. Or a very hands-on organised person, sort of your own personal PA.
Only in my experience Fate is no such thing, and the same goes for his little brother, Destiny. Quite frankly they've made a real mess of things where I'm concerned. So from now on they can bugger off and stop meddling. I'm taking charge of my own life, and when it comes to love, Fate can mind its own bloody business. — Alexandra Potter

Through Gandhi and my own life experience, I have learned about nonviolence. I believe that human life is a very special gift from God, and that no one has a right to take that away in any cause, however just. I am convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence. — Cesar Chavez

What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. — Gilles Deleuze

In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that "something within him" discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him - they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own. — David Eagleman

When I look back upon my own religious experience," says Andrew Murray, "or round upon the Church of Christ in the world, I stand amazed at the thought of how little humility is sought after as the distinguishing feature of the discipleship of Jesus. In preaching and living, in the daily intercourse of the home and social life, in the more special fellowship with Christians, in the direction and performance of work for Christ - alas! how much proof there is that humility is not esteemed the cardinal virtue, the only root from which the graces can grow, the one indispensable condition of true fellowship with Jesus. — D.L. Moody

You're right, i don't have common sense. I don't want to believe what every one else believes. I have my own thoughts, things that weren't taught to me or things that I didn't read in a book. I learn from experience - you, you are afraid to experience anything and so you will always have your common sense and only your common sense. — Cecelia Ahern

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life. — Eleanor Roosevelt

If I tell you that it was my faith, you might say if you have to go through suffering, 'I don't have Corrie ten Boom's faith.' But if I tell you it was Jesus, then you can trust that He who helped me through will do the same for you. I have always believed it, but now I know from my own experience that His light is stronger than the deepest darkness. — Pamela Rosewell Moore

My father respected and admired my mother and was a person who was always standing by my side, encouraging me to do more and believed in my capacity. So in that sense, my own experience was very good in becoming an empowered woman. From early on, I carried that strong message: 'You can do it.' So I never had any doubt that women can do a lot. — Michelle Bachelet

In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep. — Germaine Greer

That's when I realized that sex was not necessarily a shared thing. Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other. It didn't necessarily bring you closer. In fact, it could highlight the parts of you that feel most separate. Sex could reveal to you your own isolation. Sam had told me that this act added up to love, but I did not feel loved by Carlos then, nor, in that moment, could I feel my love for him. — Liz Murray

From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It's never worked for me when I've been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one's bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about "responsibility assumption," but it's all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. And powerlessness was — Irvin D. Yalom

In fact, our bodies are never the same--each minute, they undergo changes, even if imperceptible. Eisenstein (2001, 40-41) points out that we have many bodies, which influence our accounts of reality: 'Writing from the body, my body, my different bodies, I have different stories to tell. They are all all of a piece although they are also fragmentary as through each body experience has its own narration (13). — Barbara Sutton

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be. — David Bowie

From my experience, the only thing you can do is take what's written on the page and try, through your own curiosity and investigation, to make it your own and honor what the original intent was. — Colin Farrell

I have argued that when we encounter other humans we experience them first as persons, and cannot help but do so. This means that in order to see a human person as an animal or organism we must abstract from the totality of our experience. My suggestion is that we take this fact seriously in understanding the ontology of everyday objects. According to this proposal a "human animal" or "human organism" is not a thing in its own right, but rather a particular perspective we take on ourselves and our lives, one that attends only to our purely biological functions. — Marya Schechtman

I believe in magic. Writing is my magic wand, and through my magic I create my own secret world, away from all these worries and responsibilities. Love, honesty and humanity is essential to enter this beautiful world of magic. I dwell among White magical peacocks, glowing unicorns, fire breathing turquoise dragons, talking trees, flying horses, talking wise jackals and wolves, crystal water falls, secret pathways hidden in urban gardens and books with doorways to secret worlds. You need to believe in magic to experience it. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Paradoxically, the more Michael kept me at a distance, the more I trusted him - perhaps because he was always willing to help me with tips and introductions even though he wanted absolutely nothing from me (and never reciprocated my nosiness with personal questions of his own with me). — Zack Love

I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person's mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential. — Daniel Tammet

A primary purpose of school - and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well - is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities. — Derrick Jensen

From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalizing, of course. — Haruki Murakami

I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close. — Gabriel Marcel

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories. — Taylor Swift

The southern Chinese are a mixture of the Han, or northern Chinese, and the local tribes, some of which allowed women a great deal of freedom - much to the horror of the Chinese who were good Confucians. As a result, the folklore from southern China has strong females; and I found that the folktales mirrored my own experience. — Laurence Yep

You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit. — Eugen Herrigel

I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart
to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart. — Katherine Paterson

When I base my Christian life on my Christian experience, I become locked in the labyrinth of my own performance. I am only as sure of God as my current emotions and obedience allow. My eyes are fixed on myself. The gospel, the good news, is the way the Holy Spirit turns our eyes away from ourselves and onto Christ. The gospel brings you into union with Christ. Christ enters your heart and gives you faith. By that faith, you receive Christ and all his fullness. Faith fixes your eyes on Christ and rests in him. The — Rankin Wilbourne

Don't say passed away,' I tell him, drawing from my own terrible well of experience. Say he died. Death is horrible. We shouldn't give it a pretty name. — Alexandra Bracken

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader. — Karen Traviss

Let me be clear here: I object - strenuously - to the sexualization of girls but not necessarily to girls having sex. I expect and want my daughter to have a healthy, joyous erotic life before marriage. Long, long, long before marriage. I do, however, want her to understand why she's doing it: not for someone else's enjoyment, not to keep a boyfriend from leaving, not because everyone else is. I want her to do it for herself. I want her to explore and understand her body's responses, her own pleasure, her own desire. I want her to be able to express her needs in relationship, to say no when she needs to, to value reciprocity, and to experience true intimacy. — Peggy Orenstein

In Star City, where Yuri Gagarin trained, I worked as NASA's Director of Operations in Russia from 2001 to 2003, and I learned to live the local life, really embrace it, in order to understand the people I worked with and be more effective in the role. That experience came in handy when, a decade later, I wound up living and working closely with Russian cosmonauts. Not only did I speak their language, but I knew something about myself: it takes me longer to understand when the culture is not my own, so I have to consciously resist the urge to hurry things along and push my own expectations on others. — Chris Hadfield

All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is. — Frank O'Connor

I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions. — Henry Rollins