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Experience quotes

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“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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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” - 1905

“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” - 1988

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

“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” - 1897

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.” Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan” - 1651

“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

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

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

“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

“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” - 1929

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“This is as plain as a nose in a man's face; you know it by experience; you see it.” François Rabelais, “Gargantua and Pantagruel” - 1534

“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

“I know myself . . . but that is all.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

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

“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” - 1850

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

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

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

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

“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 man who views the world at fifty the same as he did when he was twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” Muhammad Ali, “The Soul of a Butterfly” - 2004

“Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it's a wall that an active you runs up against.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and Damned” - 1922

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

Related topics

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

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)
Muhammad Ali (1)
Charles Darwin (1)
Bram Stoker (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)
The Soul of a Butterfly (1)
On The Origin of Species (1)
Dracula (1)
The Conquest of Happiness (1)
Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography (1)