William Shakespeare on experience

If music be the food of love, play on.

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.

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