Experience

Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

Each succeeding day is the scholar of that which preceded.

Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.

Experience, that chill touchstone whose sad proof reduces all things from their hue.

The ever-burning lamp of accumulated wisdom.

That experience which does not make us better makes us worse.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

Experience is a keen knife that hurts while it extracts the cataract that blinds.

A man who does not learn to live while he is getting a living is a poorer man after his wealth is won than he was before.

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.

Everything is worth seeing once, and the more one sees the less one either wonders or admires.

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

Experience is a grindstone; and it is lucky for us if we can get brightened by it, and not ground.

I scarcely exceed the middle age of man; yet between infancy and maturity I have seen ten revolutions!

Ah! the youngest heart has the same waves within it as the oldest, but without the plummet which can measure their depths.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

Would they could sell us though at diamond prices, but then no one would use the article second-hand!

Experience is the common schoolhouse of fools and ill men. Men of wit and honesty be otherwise instructed.

The experience of others adds to our knowledge, but not to our wisdom; that is dearer-bought.

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction, and set with the sharp mordant of experience.

Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.

Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with them hereafter.

The head learns new things, but the heart forevermore practices old experiences. Therefore our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.

Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain.

Conflicts bring experience; and experience brings that growth in grace which is not to be attained by any other means.

Oft have I thought—jabber as he will, how learned soever, man knows nothing but what he has learned from experience!

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

Taught by experience to know my own blindness, shall I speak as if I could not err, and as if others might not in some disputed points be more enlightened than myself?

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast.

It may serve as a comfort to us in all our calamities and afflictions that he that loses anything and gets wisdom by it is a gainer by the loss.

Experience unveils too late the snares laid for youth; it is the white frost which discovers the spider’s web when the flies are no longer there to be caught.

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.

Every man’s experience of to-day is that he was a fool yesterday and the day before yesterday. To-morrow he will most likely be of exactly the same opinion.

In all instances where our experience of the past has been extensive and uniform, our judgment concerning the future amounts to moral certainty.

What matters it that a soldier has a sword of dazzling finish, of the keenest edge, and finest temper, if he has never learned the art of fence.

All reasoning is retrospect; it consists in the application of facts and principles previously known. This will show the very great importance of knowledge, especially of that kind called experience.

Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of other’s bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another’s stairs.

Learn the lesson of your own pain—learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul—in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

There are many arts among men, the knowledge of which is acquired bit by bit by experience. For it is experience that causeth our life to move forward by the skill we acquire, while want of experience subjects us to the effects of chance.

He hazardeth much who depends for his learning on experience. An unhappy master, he that is only made wise by many shipwrecks; a miserable merchant, that is neither rich nor wise till he has been bankrupt. By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarcely in that; for it is true, we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. Remember this; they that will not be counseled cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you over your knuckles.

Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions—these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term “experience.”

Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.

Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience, and stifled the voice of reason.

Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough. They look upon spirit to be a much better thing than experience; which they call coldness. They are but half mistaken; for though spirit without experience is dangerous, experience without spirit is languid and ineffective.

Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust.

If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion at Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation.

No man was ever endowed with a judgment so correct and judicious, in regulating his life, but that circumstances, time and experience would teach him something new, and apprize him that of those things with which he thought himself the best acquainted he knew nothing; and that those ideas which in theory appeared the most advantageous were found, when brought into practice, to be altogether inapplicable.