A hell, from which one can be saved by a quibble that would carry no weight with a police magistrate, cannot be taken very seriously. - Aldous Huxley

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.

The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. “We are not satisfied,” he read, “with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people’s idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours.” The Quaestor put down the book, ... and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

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