Experience Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, it results in confusion, fear, and retreat. [...] The third rule is: Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Isaac D'Israeli

Every body and every thing conspire to make me as contented as possible in it; yet I have seen too much of the vanity of human affairs, to expect felicity from the splendid scenes of public life. I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learnt, from experience, that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wheresoever we go.

Martha Washington

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

As stated in the book, the First Penguin award went to students who went out on a limb and failed! This came "from the notion that when penguins are about to jump into water that might contain predators, well, somebody's got to be the first penguin." So, even if there are failures, it brings experience. Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

Dorothy L. Sayers

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

While I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical necessity. Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure.

Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

Corrie ten Boom

Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The path to perfection is difficult to men in every lot; there is no royal road for rich or poor. But difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict. And how much has it already overcome! Under what burdens of oppression has it made its way for ages What mountains of difficulty has it cleared! And with all this experience, shall we say that the progress of the mass of men is to be despaired of; that the chains of bodily necessity are too strong and ponderous to be broken by the mind; that servile, unimproving drudgery is the unalterable condition of the multitude of the human race?

William Ellery Channing

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Robert M. Pirsig

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

John Stuart Mill

Basing my conclusions on experience I am absolutely convinced not only of survival but of demonstrated survival, demonstrated by occasional interaction with matter in such a way as to produce physical results.

I don't care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin