c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Your daily war chant: ( screaming it is mandatory! )Ooooooooh today, today I will see,what a happy place the world can be!I will make someone smile,refuse to being vile!I will share what I love,take someone high above,in the sky, between the cloudswith joyful shouts!Today, today even you will see,What a happy place the world can be!Make it happen, enjoy your day,Remember it is a temporary stay,here on earth, this single hour,today I give my love a flower!YEAAAAAH! Today I kick life’s behind,making good what is unkind!Making smile who is not grinning!And this is only the beginning!Today.I.am. AAAAAAALIVEE!
— Janosch Fingerhut
My cup is yellowOr not, though not'sImpossibleIt's yellow
— Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems
Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts
— Sherman Alexie
Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.Come see the freak named after his deceased father.Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone.
— Sherman Alexie
A short poem from my book:PerspectiveOf coursethere is a hellshe saidand it hasan observation deck
— so I maystand and waveto all those kindsouls belowwho warned meI would go there.
Scarring smiles, hidden tears,You stand, heads bowed and revereThe soul before us, burnt and tornHer faded essence, we sadly mournAnd though she walked a path of liesHer spirit surely still shall riseAnd among her own, she can be at peace An eternal angel, she’s been released.
— Amelia Mysko, Hold On
Another day without no rain, is another day of sorrow.And if it doesn't rain today, I hope it rains tomorrow.
— J.M. Carydice, Aaron Apple and the Rain
Today I write,riots with insite!Tomorrow I read,take the lead!Sometimes I sleep, health to keep!But for now I write,and got no gripe!
— Leslie Austin, A Fox Called Woff
My heart is lost
—  the beasts have eaten it.
And you know what the worst thing was?The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.
— Jack McCarthy
Not all that have fallen are vanquished.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Better off dead than giving in
—  not taking what you want.
I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
— William Carlos Williams, Paterson
If, of all words of tongue and pen,The saddest are, 'It might have been,'More sad are these we daily see:'It is, but hadn't ought to be.
— Bret Harte
Holding up an oil-paper umbrella,I loiter aimlessly in the long, longAnd lonely rainy alley,I hope to encounterA lilac-like girlNursing her resentmentA lilac-like color she hasA lilac-like fragrance,A lilac-like sadness,Melancholy in the rain,Sorrowful and uncertain;She loiters aimlessly in this lonely rainy alleyHolding up an oil-paper umbrellaJust like meAnd just like meWalks silently,Apathetic, sad and disconsolateSilently she moves closerMoves closer and castsA sigh-like glanceShe glides byLike a dreamHazy and confused like a dreamAs in a dream she glides pastLike a lilac spray,This girl glides past beside me;She silently moves away, moves awayUp to the broken-down bamboo fence,To the end of the rainy alley.In the rains sad song,Her color vanishesHer fragrance diffuses,Even herSigh-like glance,Lilac-like discontentVanish.Holding up an oil-paper umbrella, aloneAimlessly walking in the long, longAnd lonely rainy alley,I wish forA lilac-like girlNursing her resentment glide by.
— Dai Wangshu
...feel the fierce way desiretourniquets itself around you andclingsClubland South of Market tweak-chic trannies powder their noses frombullet-shaped compacts and flick their forkedtongues like switchblades as they burn the nightdown bleed day to night to day toMission sidewalks where pythons hidetwenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues whichget bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz andtossed out through the cracksCottonmouth kissescamouflage emotions andstrike with a vengeancewhen hewants and shewants and theywant and Iwon'tGenet was right, I supposewhen he wrote "The only wayto avoid the horror of horror isto give in to it"it'sthe nature ofthe economy of thebusiness it's thenature ofthings...
— Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses
Shine and shimmer my Harvest Moon,illuminate the shadows in the sky.
— A.F. Stewart, Reflections of Poetry
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me will full hands; How could I answer the child?......I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about-the grass was a metaphor for his hope. But that"s not all. He continues, Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Like grass is a metaphor for God's greatness or something.... And then soon after is itself a child.... And then soon after that, Or, I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broadzones and narrow zones. Growing among black folk as among white.
— John Green, Paper Towns
When I dieI'm sureI will have aBig Funeral.Curiosityseekers...coming to seeif Iam reallyDeador justtrying to makeTrouble.
— Mari Evans
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.
— Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems
from time to time, i think of him watching mefrom over the top of his glasses, or eating candyfrom a jar. i remember thanking him each timethe session was done. but mostly what i seeis a human hand reaching down to lifta pebble from my tongue
— Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars
Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
— David Patterson
Caleb dumped me on my birthday,Before I’d ordered an entrée,“What a dick!” some might say!But don’t you worry my little sheep,I am not sad and will not weep,For Caleb Jones is a cheat!He two-timed me with some ho,Whose name is Kacey ‘Slut’ Munroe!But I don’t care about my foe,For I have found a brand new guy,My Blue Eyed, Mr Berry Pie!And I know, he won’t make me cry,For I did fall under his spell,To him, I am his gorgeous Belle,So Caleb Jones can go to Hell!
— Joanne McClean, Blue Eyes and Sweet Peach Pie
When daylight is here i dream of the night,The stars of a country sky that shine so bright.A night sky without clouds, for the moon to hide under,Revealing every twinkle and every beam, of the Milky Way's wonder.I grow sad in the morning, And i pay the day no mind.Every time i see the light coming, I know the sunset's not far behind.
— J.M. Pierce, Failing Test
Even this shall pass away
— Theodore Tilton
sad is the poem i will never write
— jeet how romentic
Welcome to thee,O sword of eternity!Through BuddhaAnd through Daruma alikeThou hast cleft thy way.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Secure in his flightRider on the constant windsHawk flies through his daysLooks then to the eastPrompted by fate’s gentle breezeChanges his intentFate’s gentle breezesMove the mighty heart to changeDestiny remade
— Steve Robison, Songs of Nature: Joyful Expressions of Life
I could go on all night, Lake. I could go on and on and on about all the reasons I’m in love with you. And you know what? Some of them are the things that life has thrown our way. I do love you because you’re the only other person I know who understands my situation. I do love you because both of us know what it’s like to lose your mom and your dad. I do love you because you’re raising your little brother, just like I am. I love you because of what you went through with your mother.I love you because of what we went through with your mother. I love the way you love Kel. I love the way you love Caulder. And I love the way I love Kel. So I’m not about to apologize for loving all these things about you, no matter the reasons or the circumstances behind them. And no, I don’t need days, or weeks, or months to think about why I love you. It’s an easy answer for me. I love you because of you. Because of every single thing about you.
— Colleen Hoover, Point of Retreat
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
— Alan W. Watts
No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny,cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
Laws of physicslaws of loveof time and spaceand the (in)between place(in)between you and meand where we arelost and lookinglooking and lost
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Redemption
From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were
—  I have not seenAs others saw
Answers I kept my answers small and kept them near;Big questions bruised my mind but still I letSmall answers be a bullwark to my fear.The huge abstractions I kept from the light;Small things I handled and caressed and loved.I let the stars assume the whole of night.But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacityShouted to be acknowledged and believed.Even when all small answers build up toProtection of my spirit, still I hearBig answers striving for their overthrow.And all the great conclusions coming near
— Edith Sitwell
I know you can't wash in the same river even onceI know the river will bring new lights that you will not seeI know we live slightly longer than a horse and not nearly as long as a crowI know this has troubled people before and will trouble those after meI know all this has been said a thousand times before and will be said after meI didn't know I like the sky cloudy or clearthe blue vault that Andrei watched on his back on the battlefield at Borodino...
— Nâzım Hikmet, Things I Didn't Know I Loved
There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.
— Charles Bukowski
All day long you sit and sew,Stitch life down for fear it grow,Stitch life down for fear we guessAt the hidden ugliness.Dusty voice that throbs with heat,Hoping with your steel-thin beatTo put stitches in my mind,Make it tidy, make it kind,You shall not: I'll keep it freeThough you turn earth, sky and seaTo a patchwork quilt to keepYour mind snug and warm in sleep!
— Edith Sitwell
Your soul: pure glucose edged with hintsOf tentative and half-soiled tints
— Edith Sitwell
The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dustThe universe, for fear it gainIts freedom from my cube of brain.Yet dust bears seeds that grow to graceBehind my crude-striped wooden faceAs I, a puppet tinsel-pinkLeap on my springs, learn how to think—Till like the trembling golden stalkOf some long-petalled star, I walkThrough the dark heavens, and the dewFalls on my eyes and sense thrills through.
— Edith Sitwell
Solo For Ear-Trumpet The carriage brushes through the brightLeaves (violent jets from life to light);Strong polished speed is plunging, heavesBetween the showers of bright hot leavesThe window-glasses glaze our facesAnd jar them to the very basis — But they could never put a polishUpon my manners or abolishMy most distinct disinclinationFor calling on a rich relation!In her house — (bulwark built betweenThe life man lives and visions seen) — The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,And silence hisses like a snake — Invertebrate and rattling ache….Then suddenly EternityDrowns all the houses like a seaAnd down the street the Trump of DoomBlares madly — shakes the drawing-roomWhere raw-edged shadows sting forlornAs dank dark nettles. Down the hornOf her ear-trumpet I conveyThe news that 'It is Judgment Day!''Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear.'I roared: 'It is the Trump we hear!''The What?' 'THE TRUMP!' 'I shall complain!…. the boy-scouts practising again.
— Edith Sitwell
I have a fairy by my side Which says I must not sleep, When once in pain I loudly cried It said "You must not weep" If, full of mirth, I smile and grin, It says "You must not laugh" When once I wished to drink some gin It said "You must not quaff". When once a meal I wished to taste It said "You must not bite" When to the wars I went in haste It said "You must not fight". "What may I do?" at length I cried, Tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied, And said "You must not ask". Moral: "You mustn't.
— Lewis Carroll
If liberty sang a song, little,as the larynx of a bird,nowhere would there remain a tumbling wall.
— Ahmad Shamlou
The children walk away from me, flick flickety off at a tangent between thin blotched beech trunks, then turn like yo-yos at the end of their strings and come back to me" from the poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing
— Jay Woodman, Following Father
I listened long to your story,Listened but could not hear.When you chose to walk that path so overgrown,I remained alone with my fear.Cold silence covers the distance,Stretches from shore to shore.I follow in my mind your far-off journeying,But I will walk that path no more.
— Anne Elisabeth Stengl, Heartless
-A Word On Statistics-Out of every hundred people, those who always know better:fifty-two.Unsure of every step:almost all the rest. Ready to help,if it doesn't take long:forty-nine. Always good,because they cannot be otherwise:fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy:eighteen. Led to errorby youth (which passes):sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:four-and-forty. Living in constant fearof someone or something:seventy-seven. Capable of happiness:twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone,turning savage in crowds:more than half, for sure. Cruelwhen forced by circumstances:it's better not to know,not even approximately. Wise in hindsight:not many morethan wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things:thirty(though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in painand without a flashlight in the dark:eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just:quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand:three. Worthy of empathy:ninety-nine. Mortal:one hundred out of one hundreda figure that has never varied yet.
— Wisława Szymborska
Most things may never happen: this one will.
— Philip Larkin, Aubade
From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.
— Rita Dove
Unable and crippled I amAs I gaze into the vastnessThe vastness that harbors your praiseAnd glories of the best of creation...If I tried to spell..A drop of ink from your loveMa quill would burn in shamefor your love match no words...ya rasoolullah!
— Anila Aboo
Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemonsoff the tree! I don't wantto forget who I am, what has burned in me,and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
— Denise Levertov
I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.
— Roman Payne
I thought I was growing wings—it was a cocoon.I thought, now is the time to stepinto the fire—it was deep water.Eschatology is a word I learnedas a child: the study of Last Things;facing my mirror—no longer young,the news—always of death,the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoringand howling, howling....("Seeing For a Moment")
— Denise Levertov
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
— Matthew Arnold, The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold
I just sit where I'm put, composedof stone and wishful thinking:that the deity who kills for pleasurewill also heal,that in the midst of your nightmare,the final one, a kind lionwill come with bandages in her mouthand the soft body of a woman,and lick you clean of fever, and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neckand caress you into darkness and paradise.
— Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling
The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
— Hermann Hesse
I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Keep Moving...Move forwardLet go Give inDecideand just DoProgress every dayAnd make one step forward no matter what's in your wayKeep moving, till one day you wake up and you're there.
— Emma Daley
I am, a shadowthat grows longer as the sunmoves, drawn outon a thread of wonder.If I bear burdensthey begin to be rememberedas gifts, goods, a basketof bread that hurtsmy shoulders but closes mein fragrance. I caneat as I go. ("Stepping Westward")
— Denise Levertov
The yellow moon dreamilytipping buttons of lightdown among the leaves. Marimba,marimba - from beyond theblack street.Somebody dancing,somebodygetting the helloutta here. Shadows of catsweave round the treetrunks,the exposed knotty roots.("Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees")
— Denise Levertov
Then a hundred sad voices lifted a wail,And a hundred glad voices piped on the gale:'Time is short, life is short,' they took up the tale: 'Life is sweet, love is sweet, use to-day while you may;Love is sweet, and to-morrow may fail; Love is sweet, use to-day.
— Christina Rossetti, Complete Poems
Things it helps me to rememberWhen in a bad mood, keep quiet or still.Baggy jumpers don’t suit you.When you’re tired you get doubtful.Difficulties come in spurts.Listen to the echo of your own voice. Avoid be strident.All aeroplanes go through clouds during their journeys. So do people during theirs.Often greater clarity comes out of confusion. You have to be puzzled before you find a solution.PMS often brings on a crisis of confidence.Ordinariness is restful.If someone is explosive in front of you, be silent. If you feel explosive, be silent.
— Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.
— Kathleen Raine
The search began 10 years agoTo find a nasty viscous foeThey searched in caves and undergroundBut no Bin Laden could be foundThe President full of seethingCalls his Generals to a meetingHave you looked under your noses?Is the question he proposesQuick smart a search is under wayA General comes back the same dayOh president you’re the cats pyjamasYou really do have all the answersDo you know that sneaky toadIs in a house down the roadObama calls him a useless bum(It’s time to get that terror scum)The SEALS are sent to get their manFrom a house in PakistanBut from behind his wifely shieldOsama Bin Laden does not yieldYou’ll not take me you infidelThe SEAL replies you go to hellYou scum this is for 9-11Then shoots him dead with his weapon
— Papa G.
There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 
— Gerald Hausman, The American Storybag
Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,And soup,And peanut butter cookies,Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!
— Andrea Gibson
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.
— Marianne Moore
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
— Paul Celan
People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
— Rita Mae Brown, Alma Mater
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Experience is not what happens to a man
—  it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.
— Victoria Holt
A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.
— Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
...talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, fromBirth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
You need to screw up to learn. You need to experience to create greatness.
— Laurie Faria Stolarz, Deadly Little Secret
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
— Oscar Wilde
Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
— Eckhart Tolle
Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away...
— Melvin Burgess, Smack
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment.
— A.A. Milne
You don’t always win, but every time you lose, you get better.
— Ian Somerhalder
When the image is new, the world is new.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
You don't ask nobody to give what they can't give, or be what they can't be. You've learnt that, you got a headstart on heartbreak.
— Jack Farris, The Abiding Gospel of Claude Dee Moran, Jr.
I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
— May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal
most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
— Auguste Rodin
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
— Malcolm Gladwell
Because I know something that you don't know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you'll move past it and you'll be fine. And helping somebody likej you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche
You should *have* an experience
—  it shouldn't just *be* an experience.
He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.
— Sarah Ban Breathnach
The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
— Brooks Atkinson
If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.
— Mikhail Gorbachev
Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices--just recognize them.
— Edward R. Murrow
Life, like classical music, is full of difficult passages that are conquered as much through endurance and determination as through any particular skill.
— Sheri Dew
Experience is what you get when you didn’t know what you wanted.
— Jill Shalvis, The Sweetest Thing
When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
— Vita Sackville-West, In Your Garden Again
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all, in my view, is not to have one.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.
— Chris Crutcher, Stotan!
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
Good judgment comes from bad experience. Unfortunately, most of that comes from bad judgment.- Tara Daniels -
— Jill Shalvis, The Sweetest Thing
The purpose of life is to watch and experience living. To enjoy living every moment of it. And to live in environments, which are calm, quiet, slow, sophisticated, elegant. Just to be. Whether you are naked or you have a golden robe on you, that doesn’t make any difference. The ideal purpose of your life is that you are grateful - great and full - that you are alive, and you enjoy it.
— Yogi Bhajan
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.
— Karl Rahner
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
— Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
— George Bernard Shaw
You gotta be in the NOW to create and experience the WOW!
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.
— Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies and Why
We try so hard to instruct our children in all the right things―teaching good from bad, explaining choices and consequences―when in reality most lessons are learned through observation and experience. Perhaps we'd be better off training our youth to be highly observant.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
You have to live to really know things, my love
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience—and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?""What kind of experience?”“Well—places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak—but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier—and that’s a fact.”“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”“Much, much sillier.”“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to—if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it—then it can be kind of marvelous.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.
— Chris Crutcher
The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.
— Sara Paretsky, Bleeding Kansas
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
— George Eliot, Silas Marner
What is more terrifying-- the things we imagine or the things that are real?
— Suzanne Selfors, Mad Love
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
— Edward Gibbon
Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again.
— Barbara Michaels, The Sea King's Daughter
A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I will have to rely on that painful teacher, experience.
— Kirby Larson, Hattie Big Sky
We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination
— Steve Aylett
An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
— Don Marquis
When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.
— John Gardner, Grendel
Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.
— Andrew Zimmern, Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food: Brains, Bugs, and Blood Sausage
Love requires imagination more than experience.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
— Immanuel Kant
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
— Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.
— Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Only so much of life do I know as I have lived. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.
— Dara Torres, Age Is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams at Any Stage in Your Life
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
The only threesome I've ever experienced is with Pantene 2 in 1
— Josh Stern
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.
— Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess
When a person has swum, traveled, run a lathe, planted flowers, ridden a motorcycle, made wine, painted a picture, parachuted, he has increased the fund from which he may draw for new figural developments. In other words, as the background of his experience becomes more diversified, it also becomes potentially more harmonious with a whole range of happenings.
— Erving Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
— Walter Benjamin
God help us for we knew the worst too young.
— Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.
— Clarence Day Jr.
It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.("The Wendigo")
— Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix
You had a near life experience.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Wouldn't it be better to die doing something interesting than to drop dead in an office and the last thing you see is someone you don't like?
— Barbara Hillary
Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human being and all it meant to be one.
— Dean Koontz, Winter Moon
Well I am young." Just as he felt a flicker of ease, she murmured in a sexy voice, "But, baby, I've been busy.
— Kresley Cole, Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
If there's—one person on the face of this earth who makes me sick it's the ninny who calls a thing 'improbable' because it happens to be outside his own special, puny experience of life.
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, Little Eve Edgarton
GLOUCESTERNow, good sir, what are you?EDGARA most poor man made tame to fortune's blows,Who by the art of known and feeling sorrowsAm pregnant to good pity.
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed.What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?
— Melvin Burgess, Smack
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
— Alain de Botton
To the yogi, all experience is seen as one, as a means to help him cultivate devotion. All experiences have equal meaning and value. (154)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
The two of them simply weren't attracted to just any attractive, eligible man; they were attracted rarely, but when it happened, it was evidently a life-altering experience.
— Judith McNaught, Night Whispers
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Experience will tell you if you need more of it.
— Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things
...ordinary experience has to be made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection.
— Shoshana Zuboff, In the age of the smart machine
When there is no one to teach you life will show you. All you have to do is pay attention.People unfortunately rarely take the time to sit back and evaluate. Their too busy being busy.
— Therone Shellman
The only true experience is of the immediate present
— Sylvia Clare, Trusting Your Intuition: Rediscover Your True Self to Achieve a Richer, More Rewarding Life
Experience prefers humility.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Exposure and experience is all, what counts.
— Lovely Goyal, I Love the Way You Love Me
What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.
— Hyman G. Rickover
Those who read books cannot understand the teachings and, what's more, may even go astray. But those who try to observe the things going on in the mind, and always take that which is true in their own minds as their standard, never get muddled. They are able to comprehend suffering, and ultimately will understand Dharma. Then, they will understand the books they read.
— Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
— Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays
Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.
— Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
Youth is a failing only tooeasily outgrown.
— Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary
You’re not born with a walk like that. You have to earn it.
— Donna Ball, A Year on Ladybug Farm
Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.
— M.C. Humphreys
You only realise how small your world is, once you start to make it bigger
— Haanim Galvaan
When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
— Yann Martel, Self
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
— Tim O'Brien, Northern Lights
Used a replica gun to steal a replica sportscar and experienced a replica of remorse
— Steve Aylett
For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret, a regret that was contemporaneous with experience, and which sometimes preceded experience.
— Greg Baxter, The Apartment
Whatever happens is for experience, because i am not sure about the 'good' thing.
— Lovely Goyal, I Love the Way You Love Me
I consider everything that happened to be precious moments of my life.The pain.The suffering.The fun…And I am here right now, because everyone was there for me.I couldn’t have accomplished anything by standing still, without anybody’s help.I treasure every moment I have spent here.Unlucky?I feel pretty lucky.This is my resolve.”-Sawada Tsunayoshi-
— Sawada Tsunayoshi
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story