EXPERIENCE QUOTES II

quotations about experience

I only ask to drink experience deep;
And, in the sad, sweet goblet of my years,
To find love poured with all its smiles and tears,
And quaffing this, I too shall sweetly sleep.

HENRY ABBEY

"While the Days Go By"


What's essential is that we learn what an experience is like by having it, we gain abilities to remember, imagine and recognize.

DAVID LEWIS

Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology: Volume 2


All experience is an arch to build upon.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams


Experience, if we only learn by it, is cheap at any price.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts


Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Essays, Second Series


It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

The Atlantic Online, Sep. 18, 1997


Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

RITA MAE BROWN

Alma Mater


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


Wondering at the scope of my experience
Cautious so not to be cold
Caught up in the comfort of what I once was
Lost in all the brand new

THE FLAMING LIPS

"Up Above the Daily Hum"


Experience is a pocket-compass that few think of consulting until they have lost their way.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust


Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Short Studies on Great Subjects


Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

JOHN KEATS

letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818


Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men; men of wit and honesty are otherwise instructed.

ERASMUS

attributed, Day's Collacon


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


Waste is obscene don't make a wrong move
Learn from experience

SWANS

"Half Life", Cop


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


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


I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes

RUSH

"The Enemy Within", Grace Under Pressure


We learn of great things by little experiences.

BRAM STOKER

"The Jewel of the Seven Stars"


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