Quotes About Experience

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

— Mark Twain

Judgment comes from experience and great judgment comes from bad experience.

— Robert Packwood

If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

— Rabindranath Tagore

Getting results through people is a skill that cannot be learned in the classroom.

— J. Paul Getty

A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

— William Hazlitt

That which we have not been forced to decipher, to clarify by our own personal effort, that which was made before, is not ours.

— Marcel Proust

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

— Lord Chesterfield

You cannot create experience.  You must undergo it.

— Albert Camus

Experience is not what happens to a man.  It is what a man does with what happens to him.

— Aldous Huxley

What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.

— Aristotle

It is a wise man who profits by his own experience, but it’s a good deal wiser one who lets the rattlesnake bite the other fellow.

— Josh Billings

Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience.

— Samuel Johnson

Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.

— Benjamin Franklin

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity.

— Helen Rowland

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.  I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.

— Patrick Henry

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

— James Russell Lowell

All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

— Mao Tse-tung

A rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gains a certain polish.

— Oliver Herford

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

— Horace

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

— Mark Twain

Do you know the difference between education and experience?  Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.

— Pete Seeger

It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.

— Fred Hoyle

Morals are an acquirement — like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis — no man is born with them.

— Mark Twain