Willa Cather on experience

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain1835–1910

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Mark Twain1835–1910

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

Aldous Huxley1894–1963Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5