Experience Quotes

Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth.

What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

What experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.[Die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.]

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.

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

There is no limit to the increase of experience, but theories cannot become clearer and more complete in just the same sense. The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of the human faculties. Hence there is no way of looking at the world, but it recurs, and the curious thing happens, that with increased experience a limited theory may again come into favour.

The unreasonableness of a thing is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition thereof.[Die Unvernunft einer Sache ist kein Grund gegen ihr Dasein, vielmehr eine Bedingung desselben.]

The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor.

The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.[L’homme qui a le plus vécu n’est pas celui qui a compté le plus d’années; mais celui qui a le plus senti la vie.]

Some care is needed in using Descartes’ argument. ‘I think, therefore I am’ says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we were quite sure of being the same person today as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.[As pessoas nunca aprendem nada que lhes é contado, precisam descobrir por si mesmas.]