F. Scott Fitzgerald on experience

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

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