Henry James on experience

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about 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