Experience

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event.

Sourced

• Experience is the teacher of all things.
  • Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Civili (Commentaries on the Civil War), 2. 8 (50s or 40s BC)

• Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
  • Benjamin Franklin, Maxims prefixed to Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757)

• The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.
  • Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson (June 20, 1843); in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, p. 88, Houghton Mifflin (1906)

• 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.
  • Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884)

• Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
  • Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, pt. 4, no. 28 (1886)

• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
  • Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, Act III (1893)

• Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1881-1906)

• Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
  • Minna Antrim, Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions, p. 99 (1901)

• ...what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, [and] of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real...
  • George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Epistle dedicatory. (1903)

• ‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
  • William James, The Thing and Its Relations, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

• Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
  • T. S. Eliot, Eliot’s doctoral dissertation in philosophy; submitted to Harvard in 1916. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, ch. 7, Columbia University Press (1964).

• Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
  • Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, introduction (1932)

• Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
  • George Santayana, Letter to the Marchesa Iris Origo (May 1933) The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (1955).

• Experience is the cane of the blind.
  • Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew, p. 83, Les Éditeurs Français Réunis (1946)

• Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
  • James Baldwin, In Notes of a Native Son (1955). “A Question of Identity,” Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey, July/August 1954).

• Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.
  • Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Interview in Writers at Work, Third Series, ed. George Plimpton (1967).

• Experience can be merely the repetition of same error often enough.
  • John G. Azzopardi, Problems in Breast Pathology, W.B. Saunders Company Ltd London . Philadelphia - Toronto, p. 113 (1979)

• Experience needs distance and what you write of at a distance tells not so much what you were like as what you have discovered since.
  • David Wade, On the BBC production I, William Shakespeare, London Times (May 8, 1982)

• Experience is a great spoiler of pleasures.
  • Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Fourth Selection, New York (1987)

Unsourced

• Experience is not always the kindest of teachers, but it is surely the best.
  • Spanish proverb

• Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
  • Will Rogers

• Only the foolish learn from experience - the wise learn from the experience of others.
  • Attributed to Romanian folk wisdom as recorded by Rolf Hochhuth

• Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide to the future.
  • Chinese proverb

• Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
  • Annie Besant
  • Quoted in Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn: How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age. Boston, McGraw Hill, 2002 (3rd edition), page 121

• Playing Solitaire is a journey.
  • Anonymous
  • Quoted in a leading Australian high school; needs verification.