Experience

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~~ John Steinbeck

I don't want to die. I think death is a greatly over-rated experience. ~~ Rita Mae Brown

There is little serenity comparable to the serenity of the inexperienced giving advice to the experienced. ~~ Unattributed

You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself. ~~ Sir Max Beerbohm

For my part I distrust ALL generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience. ~~ Bertrand Russell

Enlarge your consciousness. If your consciousness is small, you will experience smallness in every department of your life. ~~ Robert Pante

All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know; and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture. ~~ William Hazlitt

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune. ~~ Woody Allen

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals. ~~ Brigitte Bardot

I've often wondered how some people in positions of this kind … manage without having had any acting experience. ~~ Ronald Reagan

Our experiences tend to support our belief systems. ~~ T. J. MacGregor

Technology … the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it. ~~ Max Frisch

A conversion is a lonely experience. ~~ Dorothy Day

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations. ~~ Benjamin Disraeli

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive. ~~ Maya Angelou

We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile. ~~ Grace Williams

In the creative states man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. ~~ E. M. Forster

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

When I look in the glass I see that every line in my face means pessimism, but in spite of my face -- that is my experience -- I remain an optimist. ~~ Richard Jefferies

It's a wise man who profits by his own experience, but it's a good deal wiser one who lets the rattlesnake bite the other fellow. ~~ Josh Billings

There are almost as many definitions of codependency as there are experiences that represent it. ~~ Melody Beattie [Codependent No More]

Experience has two things to teach: The first is that we must correct a great deal; the second that we must not correct too much. ~~ Eugene Delacroix

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Experience: a comb life gives you after you lose your hair. ~~ Judith Stern

Not withstanding the end of the Cold War, our planet has not been magically transformed into a modern day Eden. The lesson that our generations learned from hard experience is that weakness is provocative. Every other generation seems to have to relearn that lesson. ~~ Donald Rumsfeld

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. ~~ Pete Seeger

A child with an intense capacity for feeling can suffer to a degree that is beyond any degree of adult suffering, because imagination, ignorance, and the conviction of utter helplessness are untempered either by reason or by experience. ~~ E.M. Delafield

The secret of growing old is having lots of experience you can no longer use. ~~ Stanislaw Lem

The really great visual experience today is to fly over a huge city and look down into the night. It's like a tremendous jubilant Christmas tree. You just feel life is worth living -- when you come down you may have some doubts. ~~ Gyorgy Kepes

The purr is an indescribable sound, and this forced combination of letters, namely "prrrr," does it no justice. One can only refer to the sense of joy and tranquillity experienced by the purrer and transferred to the soul of the listener. There are times, though regrettably not too many, when we ourselves would purr if we could. Yet, with all our faculties, we simply have no way of expressing our completest satisfaction with the moment to compare with that of the house cat. ~~ Paul Gallico

The truth is, we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience. ~~ Saul Bellow

Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience. ~~ Calvin & Hobbes (cartoon)

Children are meant to understand compassion and comfort because they have received compassion and comfort -- and this should be in the family setting. A family should be a place where comfort is experienced and understood, so that the people are prepared to give comfort to others. ~~ Edith Schaeffer

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it. ~~ James Baldwin

Despite the culture, an artist must live without fear of emotion, of other types of consciousness, of suprarational experiences… Let others live in black and white; you must live in Technicolor. And without a subjunctive tense you must still make your reader see the blood at the heart of the ruby. ~~ Rita Mae Brown

The voice of experience keeps its mouth shut. ~~ Al Bernstein

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something. ~~ Clifton Fadiman

The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history ~~ Woodrow Wilson

Never worry about anything that is past. Charge it up to experience and forget the trouble. There are always plenty of troubles ahead, so don't turn and look back on any behind you. ~~ Herbert Hoover

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely. ~~ Malcolm Bradbury

We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from our past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience. ~~ George Washington

Yesterday is experience. Tomorrow is hope. Today is getting from one to the other as best we can. ~~ John M. Henry

Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. ~~ Dietrich Bonhoffer

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

Never "for the sake of peace and quiet" deny your own experience or convictions. ~~ Dag Hammarskjold

Experience does not ever err; it is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments. ~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [Notebooks]

Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly -- hurt, bitterness, grief and, most of all, fear. ~~ Joan Rivers

None are so eager to gain new experience as those who don't know how to make use of the old ones. ~~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

I have had enough experience in all my years, and have read enough of the past, to know that advice to grandchildren is usually wasted. ~~ Harry S Truman

If we have experienced loss -- the loss of friends, loved ones, financial security, dreams, or faith -- we desperately need that healing humor that comes from the deep common bonds we all share. We need what Garrison Keillor describes as that chuckle that starts deep within. We need the laughter that is so very close to tears -- our other great healing agent. We need to remember that only if we can laugh at ourselves, can we forgive ourselves (for being so human) and start over -- and over. ~~ Ellie Marek

A proverb is the child of experience. ~~ English proverb

What this country needs is a credit card for charging things to experience!! ~~ Ziggy [Tom Wilson]

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. ~~ Erich Fromm

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? Experience, old people's experience. ~~ Isak Dinesen

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. ~~ Barry Le Patner

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. ~~ Helen Keller

To admit that disability and illness are hard doesn't mean that they are wholly negative experiences, meaningless. ~~ Anne Finger [Past Due]

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. ~~ Juvenal

Experience is in the fingers and the head. The heart is inexperienced. ~~ Henry David Thoreau

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are. ~~ Gail Godwin

We are the most alive and the closest to the meaning of our existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches. ~~ Dean Koontz [Seize the Night]

Experience, the name men give to their mistakes. ~~ Oscar Wilde

To a great experience one things is essential -- an experiencing nature. ~~ Walter Bagehot

The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless. ~~ Emlyn Williams

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience … from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. ~~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." ~~ Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (See Said Who?)

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 of the future but by the past. ~~ Patrick Henry

In my experience, the worst thing you can do to an important problem is discuss it. You know, I really do think this whole business of non-communication is one of the more poignant fallacies of our zestfully over-explanatory age. ~~ Simon Gray

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. ~~ Charles Scribner

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner. ~~ Eric Hoffer

It's never been my experience that men part with life any more readily at eighty than they do at eighteen. ~~ Anthony Gilbert

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age. ~~ Ambrose Bierce

If merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ~~ William James

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription. ~~ Norman Cousins

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose. ~~ Boris Pasternak

There is today an extraordinary interest in the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland, where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism, in a sense, to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses, their meannesses, to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way -- they want it served up neat, as it were, without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction. ~~ Saul Bellow

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals. ~~ Charles Caleb Colton

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides. ~~ Ruth Hubbard

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all. ~~ Vita Sackville-West

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

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful, and damaging to all things American. But if I were twenty-two with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience. ~~ Shelley Winters

The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that truth is not hard to kill and that a lie well told is immortal. ~~ Mark Twain

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself -- in fact, till it does that, it hardly IS experience. ~~ Elizabeth Bowen

Everything you experience is what constitutes you as a human being, but the experience passes away and the person's left. The person is the residue. ~~ Ilka Chase

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience. ~~ Logan Pearsall Smith

The mature, forty-five-year-old woman, quite experienced in matters of life and death, knows that it was "for the best," but Daddy's girl, who hung onto his belt and danced fox trots on the tops of his shoes, cannot accept that Daddy is not here anymore. ~~ Mary Lou Weisman

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind. ~~ Giacomo Leopardi

Population Explosion: Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won't happen until tomorrow. ~~ John Brunner

Has any man ever attained inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began. He must pass through the fire. ~~ Norman Douglas

If I ever had an out-of-body experience … I'd try to come back to a different one. ~~ Ziggy [Tom Wilson]

There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us except our own. ~~ L. E. Landon [Romance and Reality]

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. ~~ Charlie Parker

[Wit] involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience that are possible. ~~ T. S. Eliot

My experience in government is that when things are non-controversial, beautifully coordinated, and all the rest, it must be that there is not much going on. ~~ John F. Kennedy

Sometimes the veil between human and animal intelligence wears very thin -- then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping a cat, or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat. ~~ Catherine Manley

A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration. ~~ Nels F. S. Ferre

Experience teaches, it is true; but she never teaches in time. ~~ L. E. Landon [Romance and Realty]

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ~~ Albert Einstein

I have lived long enough, and have experience enough of the conduct of governments and people, nations, and courts, to be convinced that gratitude, friendship, and unsuspecting confidence, and all the amiable passions of human nature, are the most dangerous guides in politics. ~~ John Adams

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small. ~~ Doris Lessing

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. ~~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One thing about experience is that when you don't have very much you're apt to get a lot. ~~ Franklin P. Jones

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

If the second and third generations could profit by the experience of the first generation, we would not be having some of the troubles we have today. ~~ Harry S Truman

If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us we'd be millionaires. ~~ Abigail Van Buren

The trouble with being a parent is that by the time we're experienced, we're unemployed. ~~ Vern McLellan

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult. ~~ Hippocrates

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. ~~ Aldous Huxley

Nobody likes to be called a liar. But to be called a liar by Bill Clinton is really a unique experience. ~~ Ross Perot

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. ~~ Aldous Huxley

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. ~~ Bruce Crampton

In the last analysis, a pickle is nothing more than a cucumber with experience. ~~ Irena Chalmers