quotations about experience
I only ask to drink experience deep;
And, in the sad, sweet goblet of my years,
To find love poured with all its smiles and tears,
And quaffing this, I too shall sweetly sleep.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
All experience is an arch to build upon.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
What's essential is that we learn what an experience is like by having it, we gain abilities to remember, imagine and recognize.
DAVID LEWIS
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology: Volume 2
The embodied soul has two purposes to fulfill: Experience the world, and get liberation from all experiences.
BABA HARI DAS
The Path to Enlightenment Is Not a Highway
Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays, Second Series
Experience, if we only learn by it, is cheap at any price.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, Sep. 18, 1997
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
RITA MAE BROWN
Alma Mater
Waste is obscene don't make a wrong move
Learn from experience
SWANS
"Half Life", Cop
Experience is a pocket-compass that few think of consulting until they have lost their way.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
Wondering at the scope of my experience
Cautious so not to be cold
Caught up in the comfort of what I once was
Lost in all the brand new
THE FLAMING LIPS
"Up Above the Daily Hum"
Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men; men of wit and honesty are otherwise instructed.
ERASMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us "absent-minded": we cannot give our hearts to it--not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: "what really was that which just struck?" so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and as, utterly surprised and disconcerted, "what really was that which we have just experienced?"
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
preface, Genealogy of Morals
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes
RUSH
"The Enemy Within", Grace Under Pressure
Experience is the only prophesy of wise men.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
speech at Mâcon, 1847
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
JOHN KEATS
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Mar. 19, 1818
Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values--inexperienceable--which we serve.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"Experience", Selected Writing