Experience Quotes

A careful inventory of all your past experiences may disclose the startling fact that everything has happened for the best.

Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Whatever you dwell on in the conscious grows in your experience.

To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.

We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.

All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

If what happens does not make us richer, we must welcome it if it makes us wiser.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it --this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

The more experiments you make the better.

Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object.