Experience Quotes

I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

Harold Macmillan, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 13, 1963

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

Aldous Huxley, "Texts and Pretexts", 1932

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration, from the cautious quest for what they knew or what they thought they knew was out there, to an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown.

Daniel J. Boorstin

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well - Dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Boris Pasternak

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

Isaac Bashevis Singe

Through faith man experiences the meaning of the world; through action he is to give to it meaning.

Leo Braeck

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Kahlil Gibran

We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.

Eleanor Roosevelt

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.

Martha Washington

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

Samuel Johnson

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

F. P. Jones

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Desiderius Erasmus

A fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Robert A. Heinlein

Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

Henry James, "The Ambassadors", Book Fourth, Chapter 2

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Abraham Lincoln

It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.

Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.

Terry Josephson

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Henry James

Experience shows that success is due less to ability that to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul.

Charles Buxton

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Rosevelt

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

Karl Kraus

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - The fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

Albert Einstein

Unless a man or woman has experienced the darkness of the soul he or she can know nothing of that transforming laughter without which no hint of the ultimate reality of the opposites can be faintly intuited.

Helen Luke

What one has not experienced one will never understand in print.

Isadora Duncan

A man who loses his money, gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.

Benjamin Disraeli

Each experience through which we pass operates ultimately for our good. This is a correct attitude to adopt and we must be able to see it in that light.

Raymond Holliwell

Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes.

James A. Froude

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Johann Huizinga

What a time experiences as evil, is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good - - The atavism of a more ancient ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lessons afterwards.

Vernon Law

I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them, on the whole, are trash.

Sigmund Freud

The experience to be gathered from books, Though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning Whereas the experience gained from actual life, Is of the nature of wisdom And a small store of the latter Is worth vastly more than a stock of the former.

Samuel Smiles

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

Charles Scribner, Jr.

Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly - - Hurt, bitterness, grief and, most of all, fear.

Joan Rivers

Every time we remember to say thank you, we experience nothing less than heaven on earth.

Sarah Ban Breathnach