quotations and passages on experience

Nothing is a waste of time
if you use the experience wisely.

Rodin

To live means to experience--through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction. Malcolm Gladwell

If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be. John Heywood

People are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. George Bernard Shaw One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning. James Russell Lowell

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided;
and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way
of judging the future but by the past.

Patrick Henry

quotations - contents - welcome page - obstacles
the people behind the words - our current e-zine - articles and excerpts
Daily Meditations, Year One - Year Two - Year Three - Year Four

Sign up for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign up for your free daily meditation

A Zen master was once asked, "What is the key to happiness?"

He answered, "Good judgment."

"How do I gain good judgment?" he was questioned.

"Experience," was the reply.

"How then do I get experience?" the student further probed.

"Bad judgment," were his final words.

Christina Feldman

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I
really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your
ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, . . . You are forced
into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware
of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable,
but it is always invigorating.

Michael Crichton

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives.
But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are.
Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.

Luis Miguel

We have some inspiring and motivational books that may interest you. Our main way of supporting this site is through the sale of books, either physical copies or digital copies for your Amazon Kindle (including the online reader). All of the money that we earn through them comes back to the site in one way or another. Just click on the picture to the left to visit our page of books, both fiction and non-fiction!

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

C.S. Lewis

Be brave. Take risks.
Nothing can substitute experience.

Paulo Coelho

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Albert Einstein

We should come home from adventures,
and perils, and discoveries every day
with new experience and character.

Henry David Thoreau

One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is
that, on the whole, success depends more upon character
than upon either intellect or fortune.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development.
To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life.
It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Oscar Wilde

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont,
or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter
of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing,
of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating.
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

It is not how much you know about life but how you live your life
that counts. Those who can avoid mistakes by observing the
mistakes of others are most apt to keep free from sorrow. In a
world full of uncertainties, the record of what has gone before--
human experience--is as sure and reliable as anything of which we know.

Ray Lyman Wilbur

The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes
to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience,
the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Strong and well-constituted people digest their experiences--deed and misdeeds--
just as they digest their meats, even when they have some tough morsels to swallow.

Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Experience is how life catches up with us and
teaches us to love and forgive each other.

Judy Collins

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. Even a proverb
is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

John Keats

I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives,
to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which
has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work
for these inward treasures yourselves.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

There is no experience in any life which if rightly recognized, rightly
turned and thereby wisely used, cannot be made of value; many
times things thus turned and used can be made sources of
inestimable gain; ofttimes they become veritable blessings in disguise.

Ralph Waldo Trine
"Thought I Met on the Highway"

What one has not experienced one will never understand in print.

Isadora Duncan

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.
All life is an experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What happens to us in life is less important; the real question
can be whether or not we use the experience to grow.

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life

Articles and book excerpts on experience:

Faith and Experience Iyanla Vanzant
What I Hope Paul Harvey

What is most necessary for people and what is given us in great abundance,
are experiences, especially experiences of the forces within us. This is our
most essential food, our most essential wealth. If we consciously receive
all this abundance, the universe will pour into us what is called life in
Judaism, spirit in Christianity, light in Islam, power in Taoism.

Jacob Needleman

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run;
the truth that finally overtakes you.

Katherine Anne Porter

A lot of people talk about life. Some love it. Some disparage it.
And a few realize that life can be what you make it because they
have learned from past experiences. Lessons learned from these
experiences have often contributed greatly toward seeing the
possibilities in what some people call "the game of life." When
we've "been there" and "done that," we can have as good of an
idea of what we don't want as what we do want. Experience is
certainly an excellent teacher!

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life