“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”
“You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.”
“To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.”
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience -- well, that comes from poor judgment.”
“Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.”
“Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.”
“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”
“The rules which experience suggest are better than those which theorists elaborate in their libraries.”
“Experience is what keeps a man who makes the same mistake twice from admitting it the third time around.”
“To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.”
“One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.”
“You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past -- whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.”
“There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”
“Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.”
“Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.”
“There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.”
“Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.”
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!”
“It is the experience of living that is important, not searching for meaning. We bring meaning by how we love the world”
“If you take all the experience and judgment of men over fifty out of the world, there wouldn't be enough left to run it.”
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.”
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”
“Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.”
“In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.”
“Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.”
“But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.”
“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”
“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”