Experience Quotes

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

~ Oscar Wilde

Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work.

~ Toba Beta

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

~ Karl Rahner

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

~ Tobias Wolff

You gotta be in the NOW to create and experience the WOW!

~ Steve Maraboli

The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

~ Laurence Gonzales

We try so hard to instruct our children in all the right things―teaching good from bad, explaining choices and consequences―when in reality most lessons are learned through observation and experience. Perhaps we'd be better off training our youth to be highly observant.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

You have to live to really know things, my love

~ Dan Simmons

They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience—and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?What kind of experience?”“Well—places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak—but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier—and that’s a fact.”“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”“Much, much sillier.”“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to—if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it—then it can be kind of marvelous.

~ Christopher Isherwood

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

~ Haruki Murakami

...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.

~ Chris Crutcher

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.

~ Sara Paretsky

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

~ George Eliot

What is more terrifying-- the things we imagine or the things that are real?

~ Suzanne Selfors

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

~ George Eliot

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

~ Edward Gibbon

Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again.

~ Barbara Michaels

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

~ Fernando Pessoa

I will have to rely on that painful teacher, experience.

~ Kirby Larson

We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.

~ Suzy Kassem

An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.

~ Don Marquis

When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.

~ John Gardner

Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.

~ Andrew Zimmern

Love requires imagination more than experience.

~ Simon Van Booy

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

~ Louise Erdrich

I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

~ Patton Oswalt

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.

~ Dara Torres

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.

~ Thomas Hardy

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

~ Aldous Huxley

When a person has swum, traveled, run a lathe, planted flowers, ridden a motorcycle, made wine, painted a picture, parachuted, he has increased the fund from which he may draw for new figural developments. In other words, as the background of his experience becomes more diversified, it also becomes potentially more harmonious with a whole range of happenings.

~ Erving Polster

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

~ Walter Benjamin

God help us for we knew the worst too young.

~ Rudyard Kipling

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.

~ Clarence Day Jr.

It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.(The Wendigo)

~ Algernon Blackwood

You had a near life experience.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Wouldn't it be better to die doing something interesting than to drop dead in an office and the last thing you see is someone you don't like?

~ Barbara Hillary

Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human being and all it meant to be one.

~ Dean Koontz