Common Experience Quotes

• It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

  John Steinbeck

  Life, Good Morning, Adversity

  John Steinbeck (2008). “Sweet Thursday”, p.180, Penguin

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• It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.

  Andre Gide

  Life, Travel, Adventure

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• Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

  John Steinbeck

  Inspirational, Wisdom, Couple

  John Steinbeck, Thomas Fensch (1988). “Conversations with John Steinbeck”, p.124, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Mistake, Decision, Challenges

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• ...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.

  Robert Adams

  Art, Pain, Goal

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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• The rides are different for everyone. I'm convinced of that now. I mean, sure, there are some we ride together. Either we find ourselves drawn to some common experience, or maybe we're pulled in by the people we care about. Our friends, our families can drag us onto coasters and Tilt-A-Whirls that are really meant for them. But in the end, no matter whose rides we find ourselves on, the experience is all our own.

  Neal Shusterman

  Mean, People, Together

  Neal Shusterman (2012). “Full Tilt”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.

  Alain LeRoy Locke

  Spiritual, Epic, Class

  Alain LeRoy Locke (1983). “Crit Temp Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture”, Scholarly Title

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• A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Reading, Two, People

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• For is it not the common experience of all of us - you and I - that we do no incorporate the truth of these propositions in our lives? We say we know, but we do not do as we know. We say we believe, but we do not act like it.

  James W. Sire

  Believe, Propositions, Knows

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• I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

  Sid Fleischman

  Sweet, Children, Revenge

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• As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.

  Richard Thompson

  Song, Writing, Experience

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• This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Travel, Home, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1962). “Journal”

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• I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

  Harrison Ford

  Airplane, Talking, Ordinary

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. January 20, 2010.

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• I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. ...And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs

  E. P. Thompson

  Men, Class, Historical

  E. P. Thompson (1963). “THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS”

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• The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one's birthright of membership in the great human family.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Cutting, Membership, Fellowship

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• If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

  Shane Black

  Character, Interesting, Way

  Source: collider.com

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• Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

  Gary Burton

  Musical, Fields, Musician

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• Simple exchanges can break down walls between us, for when people come together and speak to one another and share a common experience, then their common humanity is revealed. We are reminded that we're joined together by our pursuit of a life that's productive and purposeful, and when that happens mistrust begins to fade and our smaller differences no longer overshadow the things that we share. And that's where progress begins.

  Barack Obama

  Wall, Simple, Common Humanity

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• ...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

  Tom Stoppard

  Reality, Names, Giving

  Tom Stoppard (2007). “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, p.21, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

  Charles Baxter

  Past, Doctors, Sky

  Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.248, Vintage

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• Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Mother, Matter, Mystery

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.215, Macmillan

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• Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause . . . True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts.

  Clarence Darrow

  Peace, Attitude, Men

  Clarence Darrow, S. T. Joshi (2005). “Closing Arguments: Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society”, p.89, Ohio University Press

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• Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

  Rene Daumal

  Change, Autism, Gold

  Rene Daumal (2003). “A Night of Serious Drinking”, p.21, The Overlook Press

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• I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Common, Miserable, Knows

  Evelyn Waugh, Mark Amory (1980). “The letters of Evelyn Waugh”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

  John Updike

  Golf, Together, Scratches

  John Updike (2011). “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf”, p.125, Random House

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