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Experience quotes

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“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” - 1689

“Wisdom is the daughter of experience.” Leonardo da Vinci, “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci” - 1478 – 1519

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

“Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.” L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” - 1900

“Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.” William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” - 1623

“That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.” Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” - 1791

“With every experience, you build your life, thought by thought, choice by choice.” Oprah Winfrey, “What I Know For Sure” - 2014

“But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?” Charlotte Brontë, “Jane Eyre” - 16 October 1847

“My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth.” Mahatma Gandhi, “The Story of my Experiments with Truth” - 1929

“Many such experiments taught me that the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind.” Mahatma Gandhi, “The Story of my Experiments with Truth” - 1929

“Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.” Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography” - 1913

“But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” - 1899

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.” Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams” - 1906

“Example is more powerful than precept.” Aesop, “Aesop's Fables”

“Experience is the name Tuppy gives to his mistakes.” Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere's Fan” - 1893

“people never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.” Paulo Coelho, “Veronika Decides to Die” - 1998

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” - 1929

“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” - 1929

“The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations” - 1861

“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.” Charlie Chaplin, “My Autobiography” - 1964

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” - 1902

“Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” - 1886

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” - 1854

“Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.” George R. R. Martin, “A Feast for Crows” - 2005

“You shall more command with years than with your weapons.” William Shakespeare, “Othello” - 1623

“I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes—what to the doctor know of lands like that?” Robert Louis Stevenson, “Treasure Island” - 1883

“Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.” C. S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity” - 1952

“In all cases positive palaeontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown.” Charles Darwin, “On The Origin of Species” - 1859

“Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a...” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“The general observations treasured up by a course of experience, give us the clue of human nature, and teach us to unravel all its intricacies. Pretexts and appearances no longer deceive us.” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“For my own part, speaking personally, I have found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have experienced.” Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” - 1930

“To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.” Malcolm X, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” - 1965

“Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.” Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the d'Urbervilles” - 1891

“Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.” Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the d'Urbervilles” - 1891

“But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.” Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant” - 1885

“ENTHUSIASM, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.” Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil's Dictionary” - 1911

“It is my belief that action under this section should be suspended until the Congress can reconsider the entire question in the light of the experience that has been developed since its enactment.” Calvin Coolidge, “State of the Union Address” - 3 December 1924

“It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, a...” René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method” - 1637

“Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.” Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1899

“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.” Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” - 1791

“It is pleasant to observe by what regular gradations we surmount the force of local prejudice, as we enlarge our acquaintance with the world.” Thomas Paine, “Common Sense” - 1776

“No, it was more than that; his wartime experience had taught him to trust his instincts, even though he’d never been sure where they’d come from.” Nicholas Sparks, “The Lucky One” - 2008

“It is impossible to experience one’s own death objectively and still carry a tune.” Woody Allen, “Getting Even” - 1971

“The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience.” Neil Gaiman, “American Gods” - 2001

“If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.” Mao Zedong, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung” - 1964

“But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands.” Hermann Hesse, “Siddhartha” - 1922

“For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all...” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” - 1929

“For an hour in that room with Le Chiffre the certainty of impotence had been beaten into him and a scar had been left on his mind that could only be healed by experience.” Ian Fleming, “Casino Royale” - 1953

Related topics

knowledge life youth learning science wisdom mind understanding age change war mistake taste personality self teaching travel death doubt music

Related authors

David Hume (4)
Rainer Maria Rilke (4)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
William Shakespeare (2)
Oscar Wilde (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Charles Dickens (2)
Mahatma Gandhi (2)
Thomas Hardy (2)
Immanuel Kant (2)
Neil Gaiman (2)
James Joyce (1)
Mark Twain (1)
George R. R. Martin (1)
Henry David Thoreau (1)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1)
C. S. Lewis (1)
Charles Darwin (1)
Bertrand Russell (1)
Paulo Coelho (1)

Related sources

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (4)
Letters to a Young Poet (4)
This Side of Paradise (2)
Jane Eyre (2)
The Story of my Experiments with Truth (2)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2)
Critique of Pure Reason (2)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1)
Othello (1)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1)
The Beautiful and Damned (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
Treasure Island (1)
Mere Christianity (1)
State of the Union Address (1)
On The Origin of Species (1)
The Conquest of Happiness (1)
Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography (1)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1)
Heart of Darkness (1)