quotations and passages on experience

Nothing is a waste of time
if you use the experience wisely.

Rodin

What is most necessary for people and what is given us in great
abundance, are experiences, especially experiences of the
forces within us. This is our most essential food, our most
essential wealth. If we consciously receive all this abundance,
the universe will pour into us what is called life in Judaism,
spirit in Christianity, light in Islam, power in Taoism.

Jacob Needleman

One thorn of experience is worth
a whole wilderness of warning.

James Russell Lowell

People are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

George Bernard Shaw

Often I feel I go to some distant region
of the world to be reminded of who I
really am. There is no mystery about why
this should be so. Stripped of your
ordinary surroundings, your friends,
your daily routines, . . . You are forced
into direct experience. Such direct
experience inevitably makes you aware
of who it is that is having the experience.
That’s not always comfortable,
but it is always invigorating.

Michael Crichton

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided;
and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way
of judging the future but by the past.

Patrick Henry

A Zen master was once asked, "What is the key to happiness?"

He answered, "Good judgment."

"How do I gain good judgment?" he was questioned.

"Experience," was the reply.

"How then do I get experience?" the student further probed.

"Bad judgment," were his final words.

Christina Feldman

If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that
every experience develops some latent force within you,
you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your
circumstances may seem to be.

John Heywood

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives.
But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are.
Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.

Luis Miguel

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

C.S. Lewis

Be brave. Take risks.
Nothing can substitute experience.

Paulo Coelho

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Albert Einstein

We should come home from adventures,
and perils, and discoveries every day
with new experience and character.

Henry David Thoreau

One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that,
on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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 life.
It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont,
or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter
of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing,
of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating.
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

It is not how much you know about life but how you live your life
that counts. Those who can avoid mistakes by observing the
mistakes of others are most apt to keep free from sorrow. In a
world full of uncertainties, the record of what has gone before--
human experience--is as sure and reliable as anything of which we know.

Ray Lyman Wilbur

To live means to experience--through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience
takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have.
Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life.
Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about
how one's time is allocated or invested.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes
to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience,
the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We learn by example and by direct experience because
there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Strong and well-constituted people digest their experiences--deed and misdeeds--
just as they digest their meats, even when they have some tough morsels to swallow.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Experience is how life catches up with us and
teaches us to love and forgive each other.

Judy Collins

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. Even a proverb
is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

John Keats

What one has not experienced one will never understand in print.

Isadora Duncan

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson