Quotes about experience
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“Whenever someone dies, a part of the universe dies too. Everything a person felt, experience and saw dies with them, like tears in the rain.”

Paulo Coelho book The Winner Stands Alone

Source: The Winner Stands Alone

Tear, Universe, Parting, Personality

“A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Life, Books, Way, Reading

“There is no cash in battling evil: just the opposite in my experience”

Patricia Briggs book Silver Borne

Source: Silver Borne

Evil

“he knew that a part of his life was complete and that whatever path he chose, he would experience the ache of unfulfilled dreams.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Life, Dreams, Parting

“There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.”

Jerzy Kosiński book The Painted Bird

Source: The Painted Bird

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Communication

“Success in life is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is usually the result of experience. Experience is usually the result of bad judgment.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Life, Success

“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

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

According to Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, this is not one of Einstein's identifiable quotations. (Source: paralegalpie.com http://www.paralegalpie.com/paralegalpie/2009/11/did-anybody-really-say-that.html.) <br class="br">The phrase "the only source of knowledge is experience" is found in an English-language essay from 1896: "We can only be guided by what we know, and our only source of knowledge is experience" (Arthur J. Pillsbury, "The Final Word" https://books.google.com/books?id=Mw9IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA595&dq=%22only+source", Overland Monthly, November 1896). The thought can be seen as a paraphrase of John Locke's argument from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Whence has it [the Mind] all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, From Experience". (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding/Book II/Chapter I, 2.) <br class="br">The phrase "information is not knowledge" is also found from the nineteenth century https://books.google.com/books?id=W2oAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22information+is+not+knowledge%22. <br class="br">Misattributed

Knowledge

“Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Thinking

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

Hostility, Travel, Communication, Sense

“In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Life, Imagination, Literature, Revenge

“When its true, when it's right, love can give you the kind of joy that you can't get from any other experience.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Love, Joy

“Many… have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Life, Learning

“There are some experiences in life they haven't invented the right words for.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Married By Morning

Life

“Experience seems to come from a distance.”

Henri Cole (1956) American writer

Touch: Poems

“Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment.”

Michael Hopkins

The Big Book of Interesting Stuff

“To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book The Mind of the Maker

Source: The Mind of the Maker

God, Time

“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”

James Agee book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Source: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Painting

“Just like in bodybuilding, failure is also a necessary experience for growth in our own lives, for if we're never tested to our limits, how will we know how strong we really are? How will we ever grow?”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Failure, Strong

“Happiness is the experience of living every moment with love, grace and gratitude.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Love, Gratitude, Happiness

“One planet, one experiment.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

“You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Life, Singing, Painting

“There is no normal. I've never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to be, and that can't possible be true. Human experience is far too varied.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Madness Underneath

People, Way, Personality

“Look, Sage. I don't know much about chemistry or computer hacking or photosynthery, but this is something I've got a lot of experience with." I think he mean photosynthesis, but I didn't correct him. "Use my knowledge. Don't let it go to waste.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Knowledge, Thinking

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

“Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”

Eleanor Hibbert (1906–1993) English novelist

Motivational

“… reality, the name we give to the common experience.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Reality

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Source: The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays

Childhood

“People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Variant: People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you can forget, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

People, World, Art, Time

“All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Life, Imagination, Dance, Personality

“I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth. She’s hiding hers away, but at the same time she wants me to see it.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Truth, Girl, Time

“Experience, travel - these are an education in themselves.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Education, Travel

“It's strange to describe reading a book as a really great experience, but that's kind of how it felt.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Books, Reading

“In my experience, anybody besides your mom that feeds you is going to want something in exchange for it.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

Moms

“Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

Feeling, Time, Personality

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Love and Death (1975)

Love, Sex

“Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.”

Calvin Coolidge book The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Source: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Wealth

“My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Money, World, Hope, Knowledge

“I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.”

Anna Funder book All That I Am

Source: All That I Am

“Scars are medals branded on the flesh, and your enemies will be frightened by them because they are proof of your long experience of battle.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

“Love is the one thing in this world that you should never have to go through alone… For unreciprocated love is the most soul crushing experience you will ever go through.”

Ben Mitchell (1978) New Zealand actor

Love, World, Soul

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Sense, Training

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Dreams, Bird

“I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.”

Zadie Smith (1975) British writer

Love, Parting

“The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

“Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Men

“Everything else you see and experience in this world is effect, and that includes your feelings. The cause is always your thoughts.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

World, Feeling

“Well, isn’t that interesting. (Bubba)
I ain’t your science experiment, Bubba. I don’t want to be interesting and I definitely don’t want to be a nubby treat for the zombies. (Nick)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Science

“The problem is, hope is the thing that can’t be reined in by rules or pinned down by bitter experience. It’s a blessing and curse.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: Flamecaster

Hope, Problem

“Fried twinkies? Paris nodded. Only once, I've never forgotten the experience. It's like heaven in your mouth, man.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Secret

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”

Rolf Potts (1970) American writer

Source: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Travel, Home, Country

“You are an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human experience.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Dead

“Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for….”

Robin McKinley book The Hero and the Crown

Source: The Hero and the Crown

Color

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opes a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.”

Melvin Burgess (1954) British children's writer

Source: Smack

Time, Personality

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

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

"Credo" at his official website http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/credo/; this may be partly influenced by remarks of Albert Einstein in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929): I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. <br class="br">Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Love, Death, Dreams, Hope

“And here in this room, I re-experience the memories again and again it is how wisdom comes and how we shape our future.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Wisdom, Memory, Future

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#127-128
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Men, Learning

“Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Love, Life, World, Happiness

“We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments”

John Steinbeck book Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Hate

“I bet if you go through the rest of your life telling yourself, "I'm sparkling," you'll have a whole different energy and experience.”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall

Life

“There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal…”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Nature

“A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing you to grow. Without them, it sleeps- seldom to awaken. The sleeper must awaken.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Sleep, Personality

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

People

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Study, Learning, Reading, Personality

“The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: After the Quake

Imagination, Victory, Fight

“If we don’t allow ourselves to experience joy and love, we will definitely miss out on filling our reservoir with what we need when…. hard things happen.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Love, Joy

“MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

People, Way

“Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love, Heart

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

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Science

“Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Understanding

“He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart.”

Thomas H. Cook (1947) American writer

Source: Master of the Delta

Question, Heart

“breathe in experience breathe out poetry”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

“I had a chance at him now. Things were a bit more even. He knew my name, I knew his. He had six years' experience, I had five thousand and ten. That was the kind of odds that you could do something with.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

Source: The Amulet of Samarkand

Chance

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Love, School, Sex

“Good judgment comes from bad experience. Unfortunately, most of that comes from bad judgment.

- Tara Daniels”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: The Sweetest Thing

“You should *have* an experience; it shouldn't just *be* an experience.”

Alan Cumming (1965) Scottish actor

“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Reality, Time

“Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

People, World, Universe, Joy

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Love, Hope, Understanding

“Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

World, Thinking

“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were, they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. How would you ever know happiness if you never experience downs?”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Variant: Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. ow would you know happiness if you never experienced downs?
Source: P.S. I Love You

Life, Perfection, Happiness

“We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

Motivation

“I can’t believe Sadie’s going to let me have the last word. Our experience together must’ve really taught her something. Ow, she just hit me. Never mind.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

“Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the "Rock-counsciousness" of the promise given her, "He goeth before.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

Love, Christ