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Quotes about experience

89 quotes from 75 people

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Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.
Salman Rushdieborn 1947Midnight’s Children (1981)
No stranger to trouble myself I am learning to care for the unhappy.
Virgil70–19 BCAeneid (29–19 BC), Book I, Line 630, as translated in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999); spoken by Dido.
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)
The journey is part of the experience⁠—an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.
Anthony Bourdain1956–2018A Cook’s Tour (2001)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Jorge Luis Borges1899–1986Twenty-four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)
- Art
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
Steve Jobs1955–2011Commencement address at Stanford University (12 June 2005)
- Inspiration
A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
Douglas Adams1952–2001Interview in The Daily Nexus (5 April 2000), reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt
- Comedy
It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
Nelson Mandela1918–2013Nelson Mandela on character, Foreign Correspondent’s Association’s Annual Dinner, Johannesburg, South Africa (21 November 1997)
The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it.
Alan Mooreborn 1953De Abaitua interview (1998)
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme… If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing1919–2013“Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing” All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)
- Writing
This taught me a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.
John McEnroeborn 1959On losing to Tim Mayotte in the Ebel US Pro Indoor Championships, NY Times (February 9, 1987)
- Comedy
When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering
Jane Austen1775–1817Persuasion (1817), Chapter XXIn 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 whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Herman Melville1819–1891Moby-Dick (1851), Chapter XXIVIn context
- Education
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers⁠—stern and wild ones⁠—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter XVIIIIn context
- Women