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Experience Quotes

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

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Most quoted on experience:

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley

There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life's "experiences"—are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never know one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.

Mark Twain Taming the Bicycle (1917)

Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by deductive reasoning... In the main, words are cues rather than clues.

Colin Murray Turbayne The Myth of Metaphor (1962)

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Isaac D'Israeli Curiosities of Literature (1791)

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.

Kim Stanley Robinson Galileo's Dream (2009)

Whatever you've accomplished there's always more to experience.

Alicia Witt

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.

Edward R. Murrow

All illusion comes and goes, but the soul remains unchanged. What is meant by God-realization is to actually experience this important thing — that the soul is eternal.

Meher Baba

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

Annie Besant Annie Besant: An Autobiography (1893)

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

William Styron

Experience is the best legacy men could possess and never desert in life.

Nelson Mandela

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

Randy Pausch The Last Lecture (2007)

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

George Henry Lewes

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.

Ted Chiang Exhalation: Stories (2019)

My art is the essence of my experience, not a representation of it.

Richard Long Richard Long (1982)

Failure is the victory of experience.

Hossein Nuri Illuminationist Depictions (2015)

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czesław Miłosz

The systematic principle is based upon the hypothesis that there is a structure in the real world that transcends the distinctions of subjective and objective experience.

John G. Bennett J.G. Bennett (1963)

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