Robert Gourlay Quotes

Experience is the cane of the blind.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.

Judgment can be acquired only by acute observation, by actual experience in the school of life, by ceaseless alertness to learn from others, by study of the activities of men who have made notable marks, by striving to analyze the everyday play of causes and effects, by constant study of human nature.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?

I learned the way a monkey learns - by watching its parents.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

I wish the children could be taught early on that our thinking creates our experience.

An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it.

I didn't go to acting school, but I've been observing my fellow man for 66 years now, and I would think that's the best school there is.

The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.