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1 " Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences lead to wisdom. "
― , Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
2 " Life teaches us invaluable lessons through our experiences and I treasure these. If I’ve been hurt, humiliated, shunned or sidelined I have grown that much stronger by learning precious lessons from them. If I’ve experienced spells of failures and disappointments, I’ve had my moments of sunshine too. But the best gift that experiences have given me is that I don’t commit the same mistake twice. They have taught me to overcome even the most difficult obstacles… "
3 " Our strengths are built not with our words but with our actions,Our fears are faced through those actions,Our lives are shaped by these experiencesand our experiences are driven by our passions.Where is your heart taking you... "
― Catherine Louise Birmingham
4 " Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. "
5 " What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. "
― Alain de Botton , The Consolations of Philosophy
6 " When we begin to view our experiences through the lens of gratitude, our heart, mind and spirit naturally expand. "
7 " Each of us has an innate, human desire to be challenged. We are driven by it, and we often learn from our experiences to set a target and hit it. Even if we don’t reach our intended goal or destination, we gain strength in trying. "
8 " [she] believes our experiences and our worlds make us. I believe our choices make our experiences and our worlds. "
― Josephine Angelini , Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker, #3)
9 " Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant " To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences -- good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as " ordinary courage. "
10 " By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders.Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories. "
― Carol Tavris
11 " Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences guide us to wisdom. "
12 " The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty. "
― Elena Ferrante
13 " Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth. "
14 " I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others? "
― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
15 " The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven. "
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon , All of Grace
16 " 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
17 " 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
18 " Sometimes we question why we're in the jobs we have, relationships, cities, families even. The question shouldn't be why? But what's the lesson in everything we go through. Getting the lessons allows us to move on. When we focus on the why, we stay stuck because we miss the lessons and as a result, keep repeating the same habits and situations until we learn the lessons we're supposed to learn from our experiences in life. "
― C. Nzingha Smith
19 " The realization that my grandmother, mother and I are one in the same awakens something mysterious inside of me. The person I am, someone I believe has more opportunities than my mom and grandmother in matters of work, relationships and love is true, yet I am still acting out old belief patterns. I am no better or smarter than either one of them. Our basic needs and emotions in life are the similar. Our experiences differ, but we are one and the same. This conscious awakening is surreal. "
― Sadiqua Hamdan ,
20 " Most of us are unaware of the words we use on a regular basis. We weren’t taught that the words we regularly use to describe our experiences and conditions in life impact and influence our emotional states. "
― Maddy Malhotra , How to Build Self-Esteem and Be Confident: Overcome Fears, Break Habits, Be Successful and Happy