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You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

— Kim Stanley Robinson Galileo's Dream (2009)

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Experience

More quotes by Kim Stanley Robinson

The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.

Galileo's Dream (2009)

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.

Red Mars (1992)

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

Green Mars (1993)

When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.

Galileo's Dream (2009)

We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

All Kim Stanley Robinson quotes →

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Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

Oh who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried.

Lord Byron The Corsair (1814)

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Rita Mae Brown Alma Mater (2001)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kim Stanley Robinson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.