Experience Quotes


There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.
– Josh Billings

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
– Archibald McLeish

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.
– Ralph Marston

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.
– C. S. Lewis

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
– James Russell Lowell

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
– Confucius

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

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
– Barry LePatner
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
– Douglas Adams
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
– Franklin P. Adams
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
– Amos Bronson Alcott
Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
– Henri Frederic Amiel
Difficult times always create opportunities for you to experience more love in your life.
– Barbara de Angelis
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.
– Diane Arbus
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.
– Saint Augustine
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
– Sir Francis Bacon
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
– James A. Baldwin
Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience. This has increased with the tremendous technological advances in communications. We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting-rooms electronically.
– Albert Bandura
Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.
– Bernard Baruch
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin
If you want plenty of experience in dealing with difficult people, then have kids.
– Bo Bennett
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
– Annie Besant
It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.
– Aneurin Bevan
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
– Ambrose Bierce
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
– Edward de Bono
The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.
– Daniel J. Boorstin
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Man learns through experience, and the spiritual path is full of different kinds of experiences. He will encounter many difficulties and obstacles, and they are the very experiences he needs to encourage and complete the cleansing process.
– Sai Baba
Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
– Roger Bacon
Everyone will experience the consequences of his own acts. If his act are right, he'll get good consequences; if they're not, he'll suffer for it.
– Harry Browne
Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.
– Eric Butterworth
Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.
– Al Capp
The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.
– Jimmy Carter
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
– Miguel de Cervantes
Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.
– William Ellery Channing
I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united; and when one suffers, the other sympathizes.
– Lord Chesterfield
Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
– G. K. Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
– G. K. Chesterton
The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.
– Deepak Chopra
All that I know I learned after I was thirty.
– Georges Clemenceau
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
– Chuck Close
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
– Robertson Davies
Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.
– Clarence Day
Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
– Clarence Day
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
– Emily Dickinson
What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
– Isadora Duncan
You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
– Bob Dylan
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
– Ram Dass
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
– George Eliot
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
– George Eliot
Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.
– Michael Eisner
If you believe your catcher is intelligent and you know that he has considerable experience, it is a good thing to leave the game almost entirely in his hands.
– Bob Feller
I had a lot of experience with people smarter than I am.
– Gerald R. Ford
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
– E. M. Forster
You may count on Mexico's support, since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us, together, to achieve a better world.
– Vicente Fox
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
– Benjamin Franklin
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
– Sigmund Freud
I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
My path has not been determined. I shall have more experiences and pass many more milestones.
– Agnetha Faltskog
The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.
– Eliza Farnham
It was a great experience for a kid, because it was a bunch of kids playing on pirate ships and water slides, so looking back on it, it was the fondest experience of my childhood.
– Corey Feldman
I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
– Jim Garrison
DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
– Bill Gates
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
– Harold S. Geneen
In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.
– J. Paul Getty
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
– Kahlil Gibran
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
– Andre Gide
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
– Allen Ginsberg
But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion.
– Amy Grant
Everybody's entitled to think whatever they want and to express that, but my personal day-to-day experience does not come into contact with any of those people.
– Amy Grant
An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.
– Andrew Greeley
I don't think I even knew how big we were at the time. It was mad. I gained a lot through East 17 and I'm grateful for being able to have that experience.
– Brian Harvey
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
– Vaclav Havel
Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.
– Heinrich Heine
Experience is the extract of suffering.
– Sir Arthur Helps
I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.
– Audrey Hepburn
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
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
– Thomas Hobbes
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
– Eric Hoffer
Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.
– Horace
We are each responsible for all of our experiences.
– Louise L. Hay
I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.
– Jean Houston
A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.
– Charles Ives
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
– Charles Ives
The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
– Franz Kafka
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
– Immanuel Kant
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
– John Keats
Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.
– Helen Keller
The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.
– Helen Keller
A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
– Henry A. Kissinger
The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
– Henry A. Kissinger
Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child, forget it.
– Diane Keaton
Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.
– Alphonse de Lamartine
God is only a great imaginative experience.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
– David Herbert Lawrence
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Have you noticed in your past experience that your kind interpretations were almost always truer than you harsh one?
– Lawrence G. Lovasik
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
– John LeCarre