Nathaniel Hawthorne on experience

Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.

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