experience quotes

Barbara Tuchman: 

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.

Benjamin Franklin: 

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

Bureau of Social Hygiene study, 1928: 

It is very difficult and expensive to undo after you are married the things that your mother and father did to you while you were putting your first six birthdays behind you.

Douglas Adams: 

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Edith Wharton: 

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edward Abbey: 

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Edward Gibbon: 

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Ethel Barrymore: 

You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Felix Adler: 

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Francis Bacon: 

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

Iris Murdock: 

We can only learn to love by loving.

John Dewey: 

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Oscar Wilde: 

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Pearl S. Buck: 

One faces the future with one's past.

Pete Seeger: 

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

Rita Mae Brown: 

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

Robert Fulghum: 

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Samuel Smiles : 

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Vernon Cooper: 

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.