Jane Austen on experience

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

What could I do! Facts are such horrid things!

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