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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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Drug addicts kill themselves trying to get that feeling they got from their first high, looking for an experience they’ll never get again.” JAY-Z, Decoded

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

“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

“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

“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

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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)
Immanuel Kant (2)
Charles Dickens (2)
Neil Gaiman (2)
Charlotte Brontë (2)
Mahatma Gandhi (2)
Thomas Hardy (2)
Theodore Roosevelt (1)
John Locke (1)
Henry David Thoreau (1)
Mark Twain (1)
Paulo Coelho (1)
George R. R. Martin (1)
René Descartes (1)
Leonardo da Vinci (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (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)
Walden (1)
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1)
Great Expectations (1)
The Soul of a Butterfly (1)
Following the Equator (1)
The Conquest of Happiness (1)
State of the Union Address (1)
Beyond Good and Evil (1)
Mere Christianity (1)