Experience - Wikiquote

Experience - Wikiquote
Jump to content
From Wikiquote
Experience
as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event.
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
Experience is the teacher of all things. ~
Julius Caesar
Experience is the teacher of fools. ~
Livy
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
Experience teaches. ~
Tacitus
Quotes
edit
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.
Gordon Allport
A Psychological Interpretation
(1938), p. 199.
The condition of all
progress
is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right
path
Felix Adler
Life and Destiny
(1913), Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Antrim
Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions
, p. 99 (1901).
Experience can be merely the repetition of same error often enough.
John G. Azzopardi
Problems in Breast Pathology
, W.B. Saunders Company Ltd London . Philadelphia – Toronto, p. 113 (1979).
Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
James Baldwin
, in
Notes of a Native Son
(1955). "A Question of Identity," Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey, July/August 1954).
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.
Walter Benjamin
, "Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1
(1996), p. 4
Experience,
. The wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
(1881–1906).
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
cerebral hemisphere
') 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.
Max Born
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance
(1949)
p. 125.
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
Einstein
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.
Max Born
Physics in My Generation
(1956), p. 104
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Rita Mae Brown
Alma Mater
(2001). (The same or a closely similar quote is attributed to too many earlier writers to list, including Will Rogers.)
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
as quoted in
The Warren Buffett Way
3rd Edition (2024) by Robert G. Hagstrom, Ch. 6, p. 232
Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried?
Lord Byron
The Corsair
(1814), Canto I, Stanza 1.
Experience is the teacher of all things.
Julius Caesar
Commentarii de Bello Civili
(Commentaries on the Civil War), 2. 8 (50s or 40s BC).
Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
, interview in
Writers at Work
, Third Series, ed. George Plimpton (1967).
Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures.
Mason Cooley
City Aphorisms
, Fourth Selection, New York (1987).
Experience may be a bitter teacher, but She is a good one.
Avram Davidson
Masters of the Maze
(1965), Chapter 1
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.
Walter de la Mare
Come Hither
. (1923), quoted in Murphy, Edward F.
Webster's Treasury of Relevant Quotations
, Greenwich House, New York, 1983 (pg. 260).
Truth is what stands the test of experience.
Albert Einstein
Out of My Later Years
(1956), p. 115
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.
T. S. Eliot
, Eliot's doctoral dissertation in philosophy; submitted to Harvard in 1916.
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley
, Chapter 7, Columbia University Press (1964).
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.
Minister Faust
In the Parliament with the Man of Metal
in
E-Force
(2012),
ISBN 978-1-92708-102-0
p. 138
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
Benjamin Franklin
, Maxims prefixed to
Poor Richard's Almanac
(1757).
A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Saturday Review
(1859).
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
Texts and Pretexts
, introduction (1932).
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).
'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.
William James
The Thing and Its Relations
, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).
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)
There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Romance and Reality
(1831), Vol III, page 97
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
Vernon Lee
Hortus Vitae
, (1904). Quoted in Patricia Julian Smith,
The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations
(1999).
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.
Abraham Maslow
As quoted in
The Meaning of Life : According to the Great and the Good
(2007) edited by Richard T. Kinnier
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
Paradise Lost
(1667; 1674), Book VIII, line 807.
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), Chapter 39: Be the First Penguin, p. 149
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.
Osho
Life, Love, Laughter: Celebrating Your Existence
(2009)
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.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Galileo's Dream
(2009), Chapter 20, p. 513–514.
Experience is the cane of the blind.
Jacques Roumain
Masters of the Dew
(1946), p. 83, Les Éditeurs Français Réunis.
Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
Joseph Roux
Meditations of a Parish Priest
, pt. 4, no. 28 (1886).
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
, letter to the Marchesa Iris Origo (May 1933)
The Letters of George Santayana
, ed. Daniel Cory (1955).
...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), Epistle dedicatory.
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
(1600-02), Act I, scene 3, line 45.
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), III, line 6.
Experientia docet.
Experience teaches.
Tacitus
Annales
(AD 117), Book V. 6.
The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.
Henry David Thoreau
, letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson (June 20, 1843); in
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
, vol. 6, p. 88, Houghton Mifflin (1906).
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)
[1]
pp. 90-91.
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).
Experto credite.
Believe one who has tried it.
Virgil
Æneid
(29-19 BC), XI. 283.
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.
David Wade
, On the BBC production
I, William Shakespeare
, London Times (May 8, 1982).
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere's Fan
, Act III (1893).
Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late.
Gene Wolfe
The Book of the Short Sun
, Volume 2:
In Green's Jungles
(2000), Ch. 1.
Experience is a good teacher, but a hard one. She gives the test first and the lesson afterward.
Author unknown; published without attribution in
"Notes—on these changing times"
in
Changing Times: The Kiplinger's Magazine
(December 1952), p. 4.
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
edit
Quotes reported in
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
(1922), p. 244-45.
Suffering brings experience.
Æschylus
Agamemnon
, 185.
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!
Elizabeth Akers Allen
Endurance
By experience we find out a shorter way by a long wandering. Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.
Roger Ascham
Schoolmaster
It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience.
Roger Ascham
Schoolmaster
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Ancient Mariner
, Part VII. Last St.
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.
George Crabbe
Borough
, Letter VII, line 47.
In her experience all her friends relied,
Heaven was her help and nature was her guide.
George Crabbe
Parish Register
, Part III.
Tu proverai si come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com' è duro calle
Lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale.
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
Paradiso
, XVII. 58.
Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oration
The American Scholar
Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.
James Anthony Froude
Short Studies on Great Subjects
, Education.
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
James Anthony Froude
Short Studies on Great Subjects
, Party Politics.
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.
James Anthony Froude
Short Studies on Great Subjects
, Society in Italy in the Last Days of the Roman Republic.
Experience join'd with common sense,
To mortals is a providence.
Matthew Green
The Spleen
, line 312.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
Patrick Henry
, speech at the Virginia Convention (March 23, 1775).
Stultorum eventus magister est.
Experience is the teacher of fools.
Livy
Annales
, XXII. 39.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell
Among my Books
Shakespeare Once More
Semper enim ex aliis alia proseminat usus.
Experience is always sowing the seed of one thing after another.
Marcus Manilius
Astronomica
, I. 90.
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
Rules of the Road
Who heeds not experience, trust him not.
John Boyle O'Reilly
Rules of the Road
Nam in omnibus fere minus valent præcepta quam experimenta.
In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.
Quintilian
De Institutione Oratorio
, II. 5. 5.
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.
Alfred Tennyson
Ulysses
. (Free rendering of Dante's
Inferno
, Canto XVI).
And others' follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches,
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.
Alfred Tennyson
Will Waterproof
; Lyrical Monologue.
Experto crede Roberto.
Believe Robert who has tried it.
A proverb quoted by
Robert Burton
, introduction to
Anatomy of Melancholy
, Common in the middle ages. Experto crede Ruberto is given as a saying in a discourse of Ulricus Meliter to Sigismond, Archduke of Austria (1489). Same in Coronis—Apolog. pro Erasmus Coll. First version is in an epitaph in an old chapel of Exeter College. (1627). Le Roux de Lincy traces it to Gomès de Trier,
Jardin de Recreation
(1611).
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.
Mrs. Humphry Ward
Robert Elsmere
, Chapter XXVII.
Da dacht ich oft: schwatzt noch so hoch gelehrt,
Man weiss doch nichts, als was man selbst erfährt.
I have often thought that however learned you may talk about it, one knows nothing but what he learns from his own experience.
Christoph Martin Wieland
Oberon
, II. 24.
Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations
(1989)
edit
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.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, vol. 10, Introduction, p. 6 (1899).
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.
Patrick Henry
, speech to the Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775. William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, 9th ed., p. 138–39 (1836, reprinted 1970). Language altered to first person.
We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience.
Abraham Lincoln
, speech on the sub-Treasury, in the hall of the House of Representatives, Springfield, Illinois, December 26, 1839. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 1, p. 166 (1953).
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
George Bernard Shaw
, appendix 2 to Man and Superman, "Maxims for Revolutionists," in his Selected Plays with Prefaces, vol. 3, p. 742 (1948).
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
, Following the Equator, vol. 1 (vol. 5 of The Writings of Mark Twain), chapter 11, epigraph, p. 125 (1897, reprinted 1968).
I've seen the elephant, and I've heard the owl, and I've been to the other side of the mountain.
Author unknown. "'Seeing the elephant,' though it has pre– and post–gold rush currency, was an immensely popular expression among the overlanders [those journeying in covered wagons to Oregon and California] … connoting, in the main, experiencing hardship and difficulty and somehow surviving. Emigrant diaries and letters are filled with humorous references to that ubiquitous animal." John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60, chapter 4, p. 443, note 22 (1979).
Proverbs and sayings about experience
edit
All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untraveled
world
whose margins fade forever and
forever
as we
move
Lord Tennyson
All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untraveled
world
whose margins fade forever and forever as we move.
William Laud
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.
Thomas Carlyle
External links
edit
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
has an article about:
Experience
Wiktionary
Look up
experience
in
Wiktionary
, the free dictionary
Thomas Carlyle
Retrieved from "
Category
Themes
Experience
Add topic