Experience Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Albert Einstein

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

Those experienced in work must take up the study of theory and must read seriously; only then will they be able to systematize and synthesize their experience and raise it to the level of theory, only then will they not mistake their partial experience for universal truth and not commit empiricist errors.

Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

René Descartes

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Thomas Jefferson

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

Albert Einstein

Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.

George Washington

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

Theodor W. Adorno

Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the "treasure hard to attain." He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust.

The most skillful physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in their own persons.

Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order.... This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.

Albert Einstein

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.

Bertrand Russell

Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man - his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from where it comes.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.

Albert Einstein

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience.

Abraham Lincoln