Quotes about experience
page 11

“Jesus tends to his people individually. He personally sees to our needs. We all receive Jesus' touch. We experience his care.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: Experiencing the Heart of Jesus: Knowing His Heart, Feeling His Love

People, Personality

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love, Fear, Heart

“And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall”

Jodi Picoult book Second Glance

Source: Second Glance

Personality

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

History, Learning

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t know what you wanted.”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: The Sweetest Thing

“Nothing is permanent," Magnus said. "I know this from experience. But you can get new things. You can meet new people. You can go on.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Rise of the Hotel Dumort

People

“God is an experience of supreme love.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Love, God

“Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.

- Hannah Schneider”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Dogs, Sun, Happiness

“Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

“Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Books, Way, Learning

“The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is…”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island

Chance

“Besides, when not hard at work with this research, I'm actually conducting a side experiment on how cigarettes and gin increase charisma. As you might guess, the results are looking very promising.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after this. I don't want to get so used to falling in love that i get curious to experience something more extreme - whatever that may be.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

Love, Hope

“But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Passion

“We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”

John Dewey book Experience and Education

Source: Experience and Education

Time, Future

“It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me…if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me…”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: The Open Door

Life, Pleasure, Heart

“So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason - to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

Nature

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

Smile, Beauty

“Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Wisdom, Courage, Question, Universe

“Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast.”

William Nicholson movie Shadowlands

Source: Shadowlands (1993)

Learning, Teachers

“I knew you loved me and that you'd do anything for me. And that was one of the reasons it hurt so much when you ended it, Dawson. Because I knew even then how rare that kind of love is. Only the luckiest people get to experience it at all.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Best of Me

Source: The Best of Me

Love, People, Hurt

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Dreams, Hope, Feeling, Spring

“Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Fools, Learning

“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

http://www.girlscantwhat.com/2007/10/15/i-am-my-own-experiment/ <br class="br">Variant: I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Art

“Nico was devastatingly alone. He’d lost his big sister Bianca. He’d pushed away all other demigods who’d tried to get close to him. His experiences at Camp Half-Blood, in the Labyrinth and in Tartarus had left him scarred, afraid to trust anyone.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Sister

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Funny

“One must not speak of such things. One is still scarred from that experience.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: P.S. I Love You

“There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.”

Haruki Murakami book The Elephant Vanishes

Source: The Elephant Vanishes

Understanding

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

World, Knowledge, Passion, Reading

“Emma," said Cameron warningly. "The Clave won't like it."
The Clave was the Shadowhunter government. In Kit's experience, they didn't like anything.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die…. (90)”

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

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Truth

“I can't say for sure, because I have no experience, but -- well, is this what family is like? The feeling that everyone's connected, that with one piece missing the whole thing's broken?”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Family, Feeling

“In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Wisdom, Time

“Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. book Strength to Love

Source: Strength to Love

Love, Hate, Joy, Selfishness

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Plague of Doves

“If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

Failure, Forgetting

“A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Knowledge, Baby

“To travel is the experience of ceasing to be the person you are trying to be, and becoming the person you really are.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Travel, Personality

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

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

Beauty, Art, Science, Dead

“Life isn't fair,' Skulduggery said. 'In my experience, death isn't so different.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Life, Death

“To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Faith

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion (1934) American writer

“being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Education, Intelligence

“After my bad experience as a kite, I simply refused to go about as a glowing Sadie-headed chicken. That’s fine for Carter, but I have standards.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“A cynic by experience, a romantic by inclination and now a hero by necessity.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Legend

“The degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 229

“Many who have gazed upon me have compared the experience to gazing at the radiance of the sun.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Sun

“You wouldn’t be normal if you were never afraid. Even the bravest men experience fear. One of the biggest jobs we all face in combat is to overcome fear.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Men, Fear

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Life, Childhood

“… talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Back To Work, Wise

“As we encounter new experiences with a mindful and wise attention, we discover that one of three things will happen to our new experience: it will go away, it will stay the same, or it will get more intense. whatever happens does not really matter.”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

Source: A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life

“Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.”

Joanne Harris book The Gospel of Loki

Source: The Gospel of Loki

Pain, Sense

“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Time

“a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 19

Love, Parting

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Learning

“By far the best proof is experience.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Life, Imagination

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

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

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

Pain, Freedom

“How rude. Many who have gazed upon me have compared the experience to gazing
at the radiance of the sun."
Jem still had his eyes closed. "If they mean it gives you a headache, they aren't wrong.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Sun