Experience

"The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock."

"The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path."

"Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills."

"Experience can be merely the repetition of same error often enough."

"Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair."

"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—inexperiencable—which we serve."

"Experience, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"The generation to which EINSTEIN, BOHR and I belong, was taught that there exists an objective physical world, which unfolds itself according to immutable laws independent of us; we are watching this process as the audience watches a play in a theatre. still believes that this should be the relation between the scientific observer and his subject. Quantum mechanics, however, interprets the experience gained in atomic physics in a different way."

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

"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."

"Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried?"

"Experience is the teacher of all things."

"Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it."

"Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures."

"Experience may be a bitter teacher, but She is a good one."

"Experience seems to be like the shining of a bright lantern. It suddenly makes clear in the mind what was already there perhaps, but dim."

"Truth is what stands the test of experience."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"Experience exists and therefore is true in its mere existence, but perhaps not beyond. It may not be truthful in reference to anything beyond itself."

"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

"A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory."

"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."

"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."

"'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories."

"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."

"There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own."

"As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking."

"The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within — and make the point: This can be done."

"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."

"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.'"

"By and by people learn how not to believe, how not to trust, how to become chronic doubters. And this happens so slowly, in such small doses that you are never alert to what is happening to you. By the time it has happened, it is too late. This is what people call "experience". They call a person experienced if he has lost his contact with his heart: they say that he is a very experienced man, very clever, very cunning, nobody can deceive him."

"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."

"Experience is the cane of the blind."

"Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained."

"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."

"...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..."

"I shall the effect of this good lesson keep, As watchman to my heart."

"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."

"Experientia docet."

"The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present."

"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."

"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."

"Experto credite."

"Experience needs distance and what you write of at a distance tells not so much what you were like as what you have discovered since."

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."

"Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late."

"Experience is a good teacher, but a hard one. She gives the test first and the lesson afterward."

"Suffering brings experience."

"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 cannot die, Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,— Lo, all things can be borne!"

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

"It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience."

"A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn."

"To show the world what long experience gains, Requires not courage, though it calls for pains; But at life's outset to inform mankind Is a bold effort of a valiant mind."

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

"Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com' è duro calle Lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale."

"Only so much do I know, as I have lived."

"Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art."

"Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes."

"We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters."

"Experience join'd with common sense, To mortals is a providence."

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience."

"Stultorum eventus magister est."

"One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning."

"Semper enim ex aliis alia proseminat usus."

"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."

"Who heeds not experience, trust him not."

"Nam in omnibus fere minus valent præcepta quam experimenta."

"I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravl'd world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move."

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

"Experto crede Roberto."

"Learn the lesson of your own pain—learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul—in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love."

"Da dacht ich oft: schwatzt noch so hoch gelehrt, Man weiss doch nichts, als was man selbst erfährt."

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone."

"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 the future but by the past."

"We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience."

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!"

"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."

"I've seen the elephant, and I've heard the owl, and I've been to the other side of the mountain."

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

"Experience is the best proof and we love to go through every experience.[ Proverbs and sayings about experience]"

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