A Quote by William James

The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.

William James

Quote Topics

Agree Another Certain End Experience Experienced Fulfillment Function Lead Lead In Leads Only Perform Reaching Same Speak

Quote Author

William James
American - Philosopher
January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910

The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

Jacques Lacan

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Henry David Thoreau

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.

Terence McKenna

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

Ramana Maharshi

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.

Joseph Campbell

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life - a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it's like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness.

Pico Iyer

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

Linda Ronstadt

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

Stephen Jay Gould

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

Remy de Gourmont

What we experience in dreams - assuming that we experience it often - belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are richer or poorer on account of it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I think ideas only lead to change for intellectual people; and not even them. What really leads to change is experience. Life itself is the teacher.

Rachel Naomi Remen

It is the function of the Church to oppose all original experience, because this can only be unorthodox.

Carl Jung

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.

Daniel J. Siegel

All of us must walk the same strait and narrow path, know the same kind of experiences as those we would seek to lead and to serve. There is not one strait and narrow path for the officers-the chosen-and another for the enlisted men. We are all to experience life "according to the flesh"; there is no other way, for it is the way to immortality and eternal life. Given the resplendent riches of the promised kingdom, why would anyone wish to walk another path than the one that leads us back to our gracious and merciful Father in Heaven?