quotations about experience
Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, The Ship of Thought
What is all knowledge too but recorded experience?
THOMAS CARLYLE
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
Experience is hands and feet to every enterprise.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays, Second Series
Experience gives us the tests first and the lessons later.
NAOMI JUDD
public radio interview, 1994
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
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Vala
The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind
Hath foul'd me.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The Idylls of the King
Experience is a hoary-headed Sage,
With hairy cheek and winter-bearded chin,
And his face maps out Old Antiquity
Plain as the dial's shade the hours of day.
JAMES WOODMANSEE
Wrinkles from the Brow of Experience and Other Poems
To rectify past blunders is impossible, but we might profit by the experience of them.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Fielding Lewis, Jul. 6, 1780
Experience is like medicine; some persons require larger doses of it than others, and do not like to take it pure, but a little disguised and better adapted to the taste.
LORD ACTON
Acton; Or, the Circle of Life
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
EUDORA WELTY
One Writer's Beginnings
No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.
JOHN LOCKE
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Among My Books
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
OSCAR WILDE
Lady Windermere's Fan
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Letters, Conversations, and Recollections
You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot -- it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.
MAYA ANGELOU
interview, O Magazine, Apr. 2011
Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Day Watch
Experience is a safe guide.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude