quotations about experience
God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
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Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us "absent-minded": we cannot give our hearts to it--not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: "what really was that which just struck?" so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and as, utterly surprised and disconcerted, "what really was that which we have just experienced?"
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
preface, Genealogy of Morals
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Waste is obscene don't make a wrong move
Learn from experience
SWANS
"Half Life", Cop
Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men; men of wit and honesty are otherwise instructed.
ERASMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values--inexperienceable--which we serve.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"Experience", Selected Writing
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
JOHN KEATS
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Mar. 19, 1818
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The Professor at the Breakfast Table
From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1825
The embodied soul has two purposes to fulfill: Experience the world, and get liberation from all experiences.
BABA HARI DAS
The Path to Enlightenment Is Not a Highway
A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.
L. FRANK BAUM
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Experience, the universal Mother of Sciences.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
To wish that others should learn by our experience, is sometimes as idle as to think that we can eat and they be filled; but when we find that we have eaten poison, it is doubtless mercy to warn others against the dish.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Her hopes ne'er drew
Aught from experience, that chill touchstone, whose
Sad proof reduces all things from their hues.
LORD BYRON
The Island
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
The Art of Fiction
Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Vivian Grey
Experience is the most eloquent of preachers, but she never has a large congregation.
BERZ
attributed, Day's Collacon
Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Experience is ... the mirror of Intelligence,
Time's open book and Life's philosophy
Sent to dispel the night of Ignorance.
JAMES WOODMANSEE
Wrinkles from the Brow of Experience and Other Poems
We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience. To enveigh against things that are past and irremediable, is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon, is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men, who have their own little bark, or that of others, to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to the haven of security and rest.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Major-General Armstrong, Mar. 26, 1781