You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

—Albert Camus

About Albert Camus

Portrait of Albert Camus

Albert Camus ( kam-OO; French: [albɛʁ kamy] ; 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, writer, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history, and the first laureate in literature...

More quotations from Albert Camus

More quotations tagged with “experience”

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret."… I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions, like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects to "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.

—Jeffrey Eugenides

Moses sees the bush as it actually is.… All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his own two eyes directly. That glimpse of the real world—of the world as it is known to God—is not a world of isolated things but of processes in concert. God tells Moses, "Take off your shoes, because the ground where you are standing is holy ground." He is asking Moses to experience in his own body what the burning bush experiences: a living connection between heaven and earth, the life that stretches out like taffy between our father the sun and our mother the earth. If you do not believe this, take off your shoes and stand in the grass or in the sand or in the dirt.

—William Bryant Logan

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