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Quotes about experience

89 quotes from 75 people

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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
Willa Cather1873–1947The Song of the Lark (1915), Part VI, Ch. 7
- Education
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936“The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (1908), p. 85
The old, you must remember, though considered incapable of action, have nevertheless a good fund of experience on which to draw.
Agatha Christie1890–1976Third Girl (1966)
- Age
To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.
Paulo Coelhoborn 1947Aleph (2011)
- Life & Death
It is a flat’ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772–1834Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)
- Talking
In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.
Wilkie Collins1824–1889The Moonstone (1868), First Period: The Loss of the Diamond (1848), Chapter XIIIn context
- Facts
Every trail has its end, and every calamity brings its lesson!
James Fenimore Cooper1789–1851The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Chapter XXVIn context
- Wisdom
The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature.
Michael Crichton1942–2008Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
- Nature
We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.
Daniel Defoe1660–1731Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 10, Tames Goats.In context
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but⁠—I hope⁠—into a better shape.
Charles Dickens1812–1870Great Expectations (1861), Chapter LIXIn context
- Change
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to Dr. H. L. Gordon (May 3, 1949—AEA 58-217) as quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson
- Ideas
Everything I’ve learned in life I’ve learned either by doing it or watching the changes other people go through.
Cass Elliot1941–1974Rolling Stone interview (1968)
Bad times have a scientific value. […] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882The Conduct of Life (1860)
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
F. Scott Fitzgerald1896–1940Tender is the Night (1934), Bk. 2, Ch. 11
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald1896–1940The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter IIIn context