Quotations: Experience

Although our inattention can contribute to our lack of total well-being, we also have the power to choose positive behaviors and responses. In that choice we change our every experience of life!
Greg Anderson

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Antrim

An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision.
Sholem Asch

A statesman wants courage and a statesman wants vision; but believe me, after six months' experience, he wants first, second, third and all the time - patience.
Stanley Baldwin

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

Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.
Bernard Baruch

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

A fool learns from his experience. A wise person learns from the experience of others.
Otto von Bismarck

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
Daniel Boorstin

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

. . . and realizing there is no such thing as the Black experience. . . . Time and events allow for change on both sides.
Alice Childress

Lean into the sharp points and fully experience them. The essence of bravery is being without self-deception. Wisdom is inherent in (understanding) emotions.
Pema Chödrön

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
Kenneth MacKenzie Clark

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience . . .
Barbara Ehrenreich

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
William Faulkner

. . . there is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses.
William Harvey

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
William James

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.
Anna Jameson

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

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller

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

Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
Maya Ying Lin

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
Walter Lippmann

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
Jacques Maritain

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

The only thing experience teaches you is what you can’t do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired.
Elaine May

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

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Paul Newman

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.
Friedrich W Nietzsche

A strong and secure man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds alike) just as he digests his meat, even when he has some bits to swallow.
Friedrich Nietzsche

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
Katherine Paterson

A lady, that is an enlightened, cultivated, liberal lady,... could espouse any cause: wayward girls, social diseases, unmarried mothers, and/or birth control with impunity. But never... should she acknowledge her own experience with the Facts of Life.
Virgilia Peterson

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

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

A widow is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practised coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval.
Helen Rowland

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
George B Shaw

. . . I know, by sad experience, with what difficulty a mind, weakened by long and uninterrupted suffering, admits hope, much less assurance.
Sarah Siddons

All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience.
Philip Sidney

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron

All experience is an arch wherethro'/ Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades/ For ever and for ever when I move.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

There's something so muffled about the way you experience things. It's as if you were trying to slip through life unchanged.
Kathleen Turner

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
Mark Twain

An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.
Mark Twain

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence . . .
Kenneth Tynan

Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde