quotations about experience
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
Of all the things that make up a girl's life, I think it would be fair to categorize most of them into two groups: things done and things yet to do. And that is exactly how the years pass--waiting for certain milestones (like blue eye shadow) to come by so you can leap over them with joy and delight in your own maturity. Things like shopping--that is a given, since you've been doing it since you could walk. Slow-dancing with Greg Alcoke--that was a biggie, since it was preceded by such great anticipation. And so things go until you wake up one day and realize that the only thing left for you to experience is walking toward a bright light.
GWEN MACSAI
Lipshtick
That's the way people go. They have a powerful experience and they use it to interpret, rightly or wrongly, what happens later in the rest of the world.
JAMES FENTON
Paris Review, fall 2012
God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. 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
From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1825
Waste is obscene don't make a wrong move
Learn from experience
SWANS
"Half Life", Cop
The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of human faculties.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The Professor at the Breakfast Table
Experience is the most eloquent of preachers, but she never has a large congregation.
BERZ
attributed, Day's Collacon
To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Her hopes ne'er drew
Aught from experience, that chill touchstone, whose
Sad proof reduces all things from their hues.
LORD BYRON
The Island
Experience, the universal Mother of Sciences.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Experience is retrospect knowledge.
HOSEA BALLOU
Edge-Tools of Speech
Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Vivian Grey
Experience is ... the mirror of Intelligence,
Time's open book and Life's philosophy
Sent to dispel the night of Ignorance.
JAMES WOODMANSEE
Wrinkles from the Brow of Experience and Other Poems
We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience. To enveigh against things that are past and irremediable, is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon, is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men, who have their own little bark, or that of others, to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to the haven of security and rest.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Major-General Armstrong, Mar. 26, 1781
To wish that others should learn by our experience, is sometimes as idle as to think that we can eat and they be filled; but when we find that we have eaten poison, it is doubtless mercy to warn others against the dish.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust