A Quote by Zbigniew Herbert
I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.
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People just want to hear some common sense... and I bring to bear the experience in local government and state government and national government - I was the first woman in history on the Senate Finance Committee - not to mention the diplomatic international experience.
Direct experience is inherently too limited to form an adequate foundation either for theory or for application. At the best it produces an atmosphere that is of value in drying and hardening the structure of thought. The greater value of indirect experience lies in its greater variety and extent. History is universal experience, the experience not of another, but of many others under manifold conditions.
There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act.
At age 28, I had no retail experience, no consumer marketing experience and no real Internet experience. But I decided I wanted to work for myself. I felt starting a company would enable me to get the responsibility I deserved and that I couldn't do that within the confines of a bigger company.
Experience comes in two different flavors: your own and the experience of others. Most people can learn from their own experiences quite well, but many people simply ignore the experiences and lessons of others.
What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
There is a fundamental spiritual quality to gratitude that transcends religious traditions. Gratitude is a universal human experience that can seem to be either a random occurrence of grace or a chosen attitude to create a better experience of life; in many ways it contains elements of both. Grateful people sense that they are not separated from others or from God; this recognition of unity with all things brings a deep sense of gratefulness, whether we are religious or not.
At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.
Traditional religions practices are important.They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer,but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love,and with love,there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior,others may turn to reading books of advice from "experts" on relationships but this is all folly.The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters.
It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.
When you assume responsibility for what you experience
and share what you experience in a spirit of companionship,
that is the same as forgiveness.
When you hold someone responsible for what you experience,
you lose power.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth.
I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.
Given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.
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