Themes

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

"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."

"Experto credite."

"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."

"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."

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

"Experientia docet."

"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."

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

"...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..."

"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."

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

"Experience is the cane of the blind."

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"'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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Truth is what stands the test of experience."

"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."

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

"Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures."

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

"Experience is the teacher of all things."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Though Manasseh repented, his son Amon followed in the footsteps of his father in his wickedness, but not in his righteousness. Children will imitate their fathers in their vices, seldom in their repentance."

"You cannot undo your acts. If you have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be personally accepted, and the consequence of your guilt inwardly done away; but your penitence cannot undo the evil you have done. The forgiveness of God — the blood of Christ itself — does not undo the past."

"We can do more good by being good than in any other way."

"What you learn from bad habits and in bad society, you will never forget, and it will be a lasting pang to you. I tell you in all sincerity, not as in the excitement of speech, but as I would confess and have confessed before God, I would give my right hand if I could forget that which I have learned in bad society."