Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

experience

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

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

But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge.

Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

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

Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.

The key to education is the experience of beauty.

The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Dramatic experience is not logical it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more frequently of her experience.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Happiness isn't something you experience it's something you remember.

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

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

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

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

Have you noticed in your past experience that your kind interpretations were almost always truer than you harsh one?

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

There is science, logic, reason there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education in the elder, a part of experience.

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

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

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

In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Intuition is the very force or activity of the soul in its experience through whatever has been the experience of the soul itself.

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

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

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

Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Experience is the teacher of all things.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

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

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

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

The only source of knowledge is experience.

The spectacles of experience through them you will see clearly a second time.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

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

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

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

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.

Capital isn't that important in business. Experience isn't that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas.

The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.

All experience is subjective.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

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

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

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.

If your faith is opposed to experience, to human learning and investigation, it is not worth the breath used in giving it expression.

Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.

Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The reward of suffering is experience.

The years teach much which the days never know.

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

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

Man tells his aspiration in his God but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

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

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

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

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.

Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.

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

Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

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

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

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

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

Experience is the extract of suffering.

Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer.

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

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

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

All that I know I learned after I was thirty.

All theory is against freedom of the will all experience for it.

Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.

Common sense is the measure of the possible it is composed of experience and prevision it is calculation applied to life.

If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.

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

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

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

Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.

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

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.