Individual Experience Quotes

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

Perception is reality.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

"This - is now my way - where is yours"? Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way". For the way - it does not exist!

There is properly no history; only biography.

There's a billion and a half Muslim experiences. All I can give you is my one weird, self-examining perspective.

Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person.

We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Every story you tell is your own story.

When you listen to old-school music, you can smell your mother's food in the kitchen. You can feel where you was when you first heard that song. That's what's beautiful about music. It's for everyone, but we all have individual memories that make us love it.

All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

Biography is the best form of history.

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

Biography is the best history.

The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a patter of systems.

I think the meaning of abortion is what the woman says it is: For a woman who wants a child but can't have this one, it can be sad; for a woman who doesn't want a baby, it can feel like a huge relief, like having your whole life given back to you.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

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.

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers