Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.
In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.
But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.
The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.
The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it's an incomparable experience.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.
The mind when it has an old experience will add that data into its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong answers.
One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
None are so eager to gain new experience as those who don't know how to make use of the old ones.
