Experience Quotes

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

The assault of our enemies is not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail, or any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.

Even if something really hurt you, if it made you feel something it was worth it.

Having grown up in a segregated environment in the south I know what it's like to be stepped on, I know what it's like also to see some black hero do well in the face of adversity.

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.

I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and tohunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.

Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.

The last decision I made was my health when I had a heart attack when I was 51.

The beginning of my life was simple and much like every other little life. I came, I saw, I conquered, as the first baby in the family always does.

Life is to be lived, not controlled.

I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

A man who carries a cat by the tail is getting experience that will always be helpful. He isn't likely to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

Always, when you know what you don't want, that's when the rocket of desire is born of what you do want. That is the fruit of your experience. Now pluck it and savor it and enjoy it. Visualize it, and find the feeling place of it. And live happily ever after, once you get the hang of this.

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else.

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.

A gun will give you the body, not the bird

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

There are three types of men in the world. One type learns from books. One type learns from observations. And one type just has to urinate on the electric fence himself.

Life is a series of surprises.

My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has damned few virtues.

You cannot learn about Love, LOVE appears on the wings of grace.

I hate learning through experience. Just once I'd like to learn something because someone was nice enough to tell me in advance.

[When asked how it felt to be a female prime minister:] I don't know: I've never experienced the alternative.

Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.

The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life.

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

The map isn't always the territory, and you have to kind of walk through it to get a feel for it.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose... only then will you learn the game.

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once-not oftener.

I have suffered most of the things I write about - or my friends have.

Calm seas never made a good sailor

But no thoughtful man's life is uninteresting or devoid of marvels. A sincere life cannot be empty of memorable occurrences.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way- not at all or in an interesting manner

Yes, my love, who soever lives, loses, . . . but he also wins.[Ger., Ja, meine Liebe, wer lebt, verliebt . . . aber er gewinnt auch.]

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.

You only live once, and the way I live, once is enough.

I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breaths away.

Life is work, and everything you do is so much more experience. Sometimes you work for wages, sometimes not, but what does anybody make but a living? And whatever you have you must either use or lose.

You smell a rose through a fence: If two should smell it, what matter?

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

All of life is a constant education.

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.