Depth of Experience Quotes

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

..a man may live long, yet live very little. Satisfaction in life depends not on the number of your years, but on your will.

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.

In order to find reality, each must search for his own universe, look for the details that contribute to this reality7 that one feels under the surface of things. To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means never to look away.

It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.

There is a way of living that has a certain grace and beauty. It is not a constant race for what is next, rather, an appreciation of that which has come before. There is a depth and quality of experience that is lived and felt, a recognition of what is truly meaningful. These are the feelings I would like my work to inspire. This is the quality of life that I believe in.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

It's not how deep you go, it's how you go deep.

It is a great art to have an abundance of knowledge and experience - to know the richness of life, the beauty of existence, the struggles, the miseries, the laughter, the tears - and yet keep your mind very simple; and you can have a simple mind only when you know how to love.

How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Women have so many levels. There's the physical level, which is a lot of fun. There's this emotional level, which is extremely mercurial.

As I understand life at different levels, I can use music to express what these levels feel like to me. Hopefully the listener can be transported to this understanding by listening to the music.

The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth.

I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's. I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or “grim” or “gritty,” I just think, “Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.” My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

You live your life as if it's real.......a thousand kisses deep

The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.