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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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.” Stephen King, 11/22/63

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“That’s the trouble with you young people . . . You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forget more than you ever know. ” Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

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

“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

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will...” Mark Twain, Following the Equator

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

“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

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

“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

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

“To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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

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

“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

“I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

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

“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

“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious...” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The more varied your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.” Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

“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

“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

“I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

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

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

“We learn from failure, not from success!” Bram Stoker, Dracula

“This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience...” Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“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

“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

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.” Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“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

“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

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Related topics

teaching understanding science wisdom self travel knowledge life youth learning change age war mind personality success words failure mistake taste

Related authors

Rainer Maria Rilke (4)
David Hume (4)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
William Shakespeare (2)
Oscar Wilde (2)
Charles Dickens (2)
Immanuel Kant (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Neil Gaiman (2)
Mahatma Gandhi (2)
Thomas Hardy (2)
Theodore Roosevelt (1)
John Locke (1)
Henry David Thoreau (1)
Mark Twain (1)
George R. R. Martin (1)
Paulo Coelho (1)
René Descartes (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
Leonardo da Vinci (1)

Related sources

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (4)
Letters to a Young Poet (4)
This Side of Paradise (2)
Critique of Pure Reason (2)
Jane Eyre (2)
The Story of my Experiments with Truth (2)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2)
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
What I Know For Sure (1)
The Devil's Dictionary (1)
Beyond Good and Evil (1)
Walden (1)
Great Expectations (1)
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1)
Following the Equator (1)
The Soul of a Butterfly (1)
The Conquest of Happiness (1)
State of the Union Address (1)
The Beautiful and Damned (1)