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Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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"There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply."
-Josh Billings, His Works Complete
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"Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience."
-Randolph Silliman Bourne, Youth and Life
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I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
-Martin Buber
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Anyone young can learn something useful from someone with experience.
-Al Capp
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Our actual experiences are much less important that how we choose to think about them.
-Lee J. Colan, Orchestrating Attitude
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"What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print."
-Isadora Duncan, My Life
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The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-2nd_Series_2_Experience.htm
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays "Experience", 1844
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"As experience widens, one begins to see how much upon a level all human things are."
-Joseph Farrell, Lectures of a Certain Professor
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"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."
-Aldous Huxley
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
-William James, Principles of Psychology
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Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
[Final words of Stephen Daedalus]
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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"If you can learn from hard knocks, you can also learn from soft touches."
-Carolyn Kenmore, Mannequin: My Life as a Model
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"Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust."
-Karl Kraus
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What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
-C.S. Lewis
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"Our experience is composed rathery of illusions that of wisdom acquired."
-Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest
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Most of the most important experiences that truly educate cannot be arranged ahead of time with any precision.
-Harold Taylor
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"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing."
-Oscar Wilde, attributed, no source found
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Books about Experience
