Quotes on Experience

I think the major event that shaped my life was being a Naval aviator. I got my commission and wings at 18 years old, and then I went into combat at 19. And I think, as I look back on it, that whole experience probably shaped my life more than any incident, or any event.

You do not choose the life you will experience ahead of time. You may select the persons, places and events - the conditions and circumstances, the challenges, the opportunities and options - with which to create experiences. What you create with these is your business.

You cannot experience what you don't know. And you don't know you are in "heaven" right now because you have not experienced it.

You will not experience all life has to offer you or begin to experience life at its fullest as long as you are satisfied with mediocrity. You have to be disgusted with your current circumstances before your circumstances can change.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you: You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth are the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this, they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grew out of the experience of love.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath fouled me.

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

I think if you've suffered, if you've experienced loss, you're probably more open to understanding it and more comfortable talking about it and experiencing it.

Experience is the best teacher, but a fool will learn from no other.

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.

Concentration is inspiration. You must be completely overtaken by your work and your subject. Only then do all your influences and experience come up to the surface.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.