Immanuel Kant on experience

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit worship of God.

There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

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