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Experience Quotes

97 quotes about experience. Every quote shows where it comes from and how far to trust it.

Random quote on Experience

Most quoted on experience:

By experience we find out a shorter way by a long wandering. Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Roger Ascham

Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of other's bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs.

Dante Alighieri

And others' follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches,
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untraveled world whose margins fade forever and forever as we move.

William Laud

In her experience all her friends relied,
Heaven was her help and nature was her guide.

George Crabbe

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Thomas Carlyle

Can you really explain to a fish what it's like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.

Warren Buffett The Warren Buffett Way 3rd Edition (2024)

Experience is the teacher of fools.

Livy

Experience, next, to thee I owe,
Best guide; not following thee, I had remain'd
In ignorance; thou open'st wisdom's way,
And giv'st access, though secret she retire.

John Milton

Behold, we live through all things,—famine, thirst,
Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery,
All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst
On soul and body,—but we can not die.
Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,—
Lo, all things can be borne!

Elizabeth Chase Allen Poems (1866)

Let us then take in our hands the staff of experience... To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie Man a Machine (1747)

What man would be wise, let him drink of the river
That bears on his bosom the record of time;
A message to him every wave can deliver
To teach him to creep till he knows how to climb.

John Boyle O'Reilly

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 (1913)

...what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, [and] of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real...

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

George Santayana

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Mark Twain

I know
The past and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly;
For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab (1813)

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)

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James The Art of Fiction (1884)

As stated in the book, the First Penguin award went to students who went out on a limb and failed! This came "from the notion that when penguins are about to jump into water that might contain predators, well, somebody's got to be the first penguin." So, even if there are failures, it brings experience. Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.

Randy Pausch The Last Lecture (2008)

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