Thomas Hardy on experience

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

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