quotations about experience
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
There's nothing so easy to learn as experience, and nothing so hard to apply.
H. W. SHAW
attributed, Day's Collacon
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes
RUSH
"The Enemy Within", Grace Under Pressure
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 only good 'tis safer to borrow than to buy.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Texts & Pretexts
Every man's experience of today is that he was a fool yesterday and the day before yesterday; tomorrow he will most likely be of exactly the same opinion.
CHARLES MACKAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Change Your Brain
Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Problems of Life and Mind
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Experience
That considered judgment of mankind upon such and such a troubling matter, of sex, of property, or of political right, is anchored or rooted in eternity. There comes a day when by some one experience he is startled out of that morning dream. It is not the first death, perhaps, that strikes him, nor the first loss--no, not even, perhaps, the first discovery that human affection also passes (though that should be for every man the deepest lesson of all). What wakes him to the reality which is for some dreadful, for others august, and for the faithful divine, is always an accident. One death, one change, one loss, among so many, unseals his judgment, and he sees thenceforward, nay, often from one particular moment upon which he can put his finger, the doom which lies upon all things whatsoever that live by a material change.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Something
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Collected Essays