quotations about experience
I only ask to drink experience deep;
And, in the sad, sweet goblet of my years,
To find love poured with all its smiles and tears,
And quaffing this, I too shall sweetly sleep.
HENRY ABBEY
"While the Days Go By"
All experience is an arch to build upon.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
What's essential is that we learn what an experience is like by having it, we gain abilities to remember, imagine and recognize.
DAVID LEWIS
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology: Volume 2
The embodied soul has two purposes to fulfill: Experience the world, and get liberation from all experiences.
BABA HARI DAS
The Path to Enlightenment Is Not a Highway
It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, Sep. 18, 1997
Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays, Second Series
Experience is a pocket-compass that few think of consulting until they have lost their way.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Experience, if we only learn by it, is cheap at any price.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
RITA MAE BROWN
Alma Mater
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men; men of wit and honesty are otherwise instructed.
ERASMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Wondering at the scope of my experience
Cautious so not to be cold
Caught up in the comfort of what I once was
Lost in all the brand new
THE FLAMING LIPS
"Up Above the Daily Hum"
Waste is obscene don't make a wrong move
Learn from experience
SWANS
"Half Life", Cop
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", Selected Writing
Experience is the only prophesy of wise men.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
speech at Mâcon, 1847
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
JOHN KEATS
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Mar. 19, 1818
Of all the things that make up a girl's life, I think it would be fair to categorize most of them into two groups: things done and things yet to do. And that is exactly how the years pass--waiting for certain milestones (like blue eye shadow) to come by so you can leap over them with joy and delight in your own maturity. Things like shopping--that is a given, since you've been doing it since you could walk. Slow-dancing with Greg Alcoke--that was a biggie, since it was preceded by such great anticipation. And so things go until you wake up one day and realize that the only thing left for you to experience is walking toward a bright light.
GWEN MACSAI
Lipshtick
Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life