It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Everyone belongs to everyone else.

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.