“What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”
“Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”
“We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.”
“Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)”
“Without imagination we should be lost; for only with its help can we interpret our experience, turn it into experience of an outer world, and thus make use of it in understanding what and where we are, and what we need to do.”
“Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.”