“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
“While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others.”
Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
“Only the foolish learn from experience - the wise learn from the experience of others.”
Nur der Dumme lernt aus Erfahrung, der Kluge aus der Erfahrung der anderen!
Alan Turing
“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”
Book V, Chapter 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Vivian Grey (1826)
Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 27.
Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. 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. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
