“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”

— Aldous Huxley

Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5
Variant: Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Source: Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries
Context: The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now 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 co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.

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Aldous Huxley 290

English writer 1894–1963

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 171
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)
Context: I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?".

“Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Attributed in emails in 1999, as debunked at "Malice of Absence" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp#MX2FyfdMLHissI4T.99
This statement has been attributed to others before Einstein; its first attribution to Einstein appears to have been in an email story that began circulating in 2004. See the Urban Legends Reference Pages http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp for more discussion.
Misattributed
Variant: Evil is the absence of God.

“It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Attributed to Russell in Slaby's Sixty Ways to Make Stress Work for You (1987)
Attributed from posthumous publications

“There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 36
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
Context: There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that he was a good and a wise man, will there not be at least some one to say to himself, Let us at last breathe freely, being relieved from this schoolmaster? It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he tacitly condemns us.—This is what is said of a good man. But in our own case how many other things are there for which there are many who wish to get rid of us.