Quotes about experience
89 quotes from 75 people
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
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. 5Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God do you learn.
WNWilliam Nicholsonborn 1948Often credited to C. S. LewisThe man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way.
Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Speech in the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (September 17, 1787); reported in James Madison, Journal of the Federal Convention, ed. E. H. Scott (1893), p. 741Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
Muhammad Ali1942–2016Interview in Playboy magazine (November 1975)Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
Nasreddin1208–1284Often credited to Jim HorningAmericans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.
Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936“The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (1908), p. 85If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
- Aldous Huxley1894–1963Music at Night and Other Essays (1931), “Tragedy and the Whole Truth”
