Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on experience

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.

Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.

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