Quotes about experience

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

— Cleveland Amory

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

— Minna Antrim

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed.... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.

— St. Augustine

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.

— James Baldwin

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.

— James Baldwin

You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.

— Arnold Bax

Experience is determined by yourself -- not the circumstances of your life.

— Gita Bellin

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.

— Walter Benjamin

Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.

— Ezra Taft Benson

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

— Ambrose Bierce

Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

— Ambrose Bierce

Experience is a school where a man learns what a big fool he has been.

— Josh Billings

Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies.

— Josh Billings

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding.

— Louis D. Brandeis

Experience, like a pale musician, holds a dulcimer of patience in his hand.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I reached in experience the nirvana which is unborn, unrivalled, secure from attachment, undecaying and unstained. This condition is indeed reached by me which is deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, tranquil, excellent, beyond the reach of mere logic, subtle, and to be realized only by the wise.

— Buddha

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

— Samuel Butler

Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.

— Eric Butterworth

A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.

— Cadman

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

— Joseph Campbell

You can't create experience. You must undergo it.

— Albert Camus

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

— Angela Carter

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

— William Ellery Channing

There is a sort of veteran woman of condition, who, having lived always in the grand monde, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him. Wherever you go, make some of those women your friends; which a very little matter will do. Ask their advice, tell them your doubts or difficulties as to your behavior; but take great care not to drop one word of their experience; for experience implies age, and the suspicion of age, no woman, let her be ever so old, ever forgives.

— Lord Chesterfield

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

— Jimmy Connors

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

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

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

— E. L. Doctorow

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past -- whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

— Bob Dylan

The only source of knowledge is experience.

— Albert Einstein

Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object.

— Albert Einstein

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

— George Eliot

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

— George Eliot

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more experiments you make the better.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.

— Gerald R. Ford

If you take all the experience and judgment of men over fifty out of the world, there wouldn't be enough left to run it.

— Henry Ford

Experience keeps a school, yet fools will learn in no other.

— Benjamin Franklin

My experience has taught me, and it has become a principle with me, that it is never any benefit to give out and out, to man or woman, money, food, clothing, or anything else, if they are able-bodied and can work and earn what they need, when there is anything on earth for them to do. This is my principle and I try to act upon it. To pursue a contrary course would ruin any community in the world and make them idlers.

— Brigham Young Fun

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.

— Harold S. Geneen

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

— J. Paul Getty

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

— Ellen Glasgow

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

— Gail Godwin

Oh, how bitter it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes.

— Wilfred T. Grenfell

Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.

— Heinrich Heine

Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way.

— Robert Heinlein

Experience is the extract of suffering.

— Sir Arthur Helps

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.

— Ernest Hemingway

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

— Patrick Henry

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

— Audrey Hepburn

The fool knows after he's suffered.

— Hesiod

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

— Napoleon Hill

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

— Aldous Huxley

Experience teaches only the teachable.

— Aldous Huxley

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

— Aldous Huxley

It is all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.

— Mick Jagger

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it --this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

— Henry James

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

— Henry James

Deep experience is never peaceful.

— Henry James

If what happens does not make us richer, we must welcome it if it makes us wiser.

— Johnson

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

— Franklin P. Jones

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

— Franz Kafka

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

— John Keats

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.

— Alphonse De Lamartine

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.

— Vernon S. Law

Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

— Greg LeMond

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience.

— Abraham Lincoln

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

— John Locke

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

— James Russell Lowell

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

— Karl Marx

Experience is what keeps a man who makes the same mistake twice from admitting it the third time around.

— Terry Mccormick

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

— Marshall Mcluhan

The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.

— Menander of Athens

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

— John Stuart Mill

A strong and secure man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds alike) just as he digests his meat, even when he has some bits to swallow.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

— Blaise Pascal

Not the fruit of experience but experience itself, is the end.

— Walter Pater

One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.

— Norman Vincent Peale

Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.

— Chinese Proverb

A burnt child dreads the fire.

— English Proverb

I know by my own pot how the others boil.

— French Proverb

If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.

— Italian Proverb

He who has been bitten by a snake fears a piece of string.

— Persian Proverb

If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.

— Ronald Reagan

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

— Auguste Rodin

In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

— Carl Rogers

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

— Jim Rohn

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

— Joseph Roux

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

— Bertrand Russell

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

— George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

— George Bernard Shaw

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

— George Bernard Shaw