Wisdom Quotes

"Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."

"The only source of knowledge is experience."

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

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

"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing."

"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built."

"Man learns through experience, and the spiritual path is full of different kinds of experiences. He will encounter many difficulties and obstacles, and they are the very experiences he needs to encourage and complete the cleansing process."

"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

"The years teach much which the days never know."

"A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience."

"I made decisions that I regret, and I took them as learning experiences... I'm human, not perfect, like anybody else."

"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."

"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."

"When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it."

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."

"Experience is the teacher of all things."

"If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires."

"Experience teaches only the teachable."

"Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."

"Bitter experience has taught us how fundamental our values are and how great the mission they represent."

"Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced."

"Conviction without experience makes for harshness."

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

"Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action."

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"Experience is a good school. But the fees are high."

"All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move."

"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."

"All that I know I learned after I was thirty."

"Every moment is an experience."

"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home."

"What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print."

"The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice."

"The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate."

"The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely."

"We are each responsible for all of our experiences."

"There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply."

"My path has not been determined. I shall have more experiences and pass many more milestones."

"My experiences have taught me a lot and I'm happy with my learnings, if not with what I went through to learn."

"An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience."

"Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience."

"Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act."

"Experience is the only prophecy of wise men."

"Experience is a great teacher."

"Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained."

"All experience is an arch, to build upon."

"Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust."

"Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience."

"The main thing experience has taught me is that one has to sort of hone their relationship to time, you know."

"I think we are a product of all our experiences."

"Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience."

"Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions are really based on vicarious experience."

"Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience."

"Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost."

"Color is an intense experience on its own."

"Judgment comes from experience - and experience comes from bad judgment."

"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."

"Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you."

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

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude."

"It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion."

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

"The more connections you and your lover make, not just between your bodies, but between your minds, your hearts, and your souls, the more you will strengthen the fabric of your relationship, and the more real moments you will experience together."

"I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him."

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability."

"Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives."

"The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse."

"Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either."

"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another."

"I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!"

"Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience."

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."

"Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience."

"Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment."

"I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull."

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

"Fame will go by and, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experience, but that's not where I live."

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."

"There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest."

"I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience."

"A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."

"The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct."

"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience."

"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."

"Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant."

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life."

"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience."

"Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience."

"Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life's deepest joy: true fulfillment."

"We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought 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."

"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."

"I don't have to have faith, I have experience."

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

"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."

"A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience."

"And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high."

"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"

"Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that individual customer who's voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That's who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it's not up to par, it's our fault, plain and simply."

"Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink."

"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."

"I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore."

"Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life."

"One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is."

"You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever."

"The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability."

"You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you'd experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it."

"I'd rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent."

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."

"DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience."

"Freedom. Freedom of religion. Freedom to speak their mind. Freedom to build a life. And yes, freedom to build a business. With their own hands. This is the essence of the American experience."

"It's good to experience Hollywood in short bursts, I guess. Little snippets. I don't think I can handle being here all the time, it's pretty nutty."

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity."

"The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency."

"Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them."

"Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience."

"Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius."

"Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason."

"I know it's an experience that I need to have if God's putting me through it."

"In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first the cash will come later."

"If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience."

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."

"How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god."

"If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon."

"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali."

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."

"Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories."

"I've always enjoyed traveling and having experience with different cultures and different people. But it's also a wonderful thing to be able to benefit and enable research, not only in our country but around the world."

"Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy."

"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."

"Going out and playing football or baseball with the boys, when I was a tomboy, was a great way to learn about winning and losing, and most girls didn't have that experience."

"We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them."

"The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile."

"Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness."

"In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness."

"Experience is what you have after you've forgotten her name."

"Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience."

"I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience."

"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."

"My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don't share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise."

"My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is."

"Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child's tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny."

"Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power."

"Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own."

"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works."

"The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."

"In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word."

"The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing."

"Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age."

"Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience."

"The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience."

"I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid."

"Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me."

"Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience."

"The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations."

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."

"Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience."

"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."

"Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience."

"We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years."

"I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers."

"I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances."

"I just go where my heart tells me, where my gut tells me to go, where I'm enjoying my life the most, where I feel like I can have the most success. I've truly enjoyed my experience in NASCAR, to the point that I want to do it full time."

"The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one."

"I've learned from experience that if you work harder at it, and apply more energy and time to it, and more consistency, you get a better result. It comes from the work."

"And to get real work experience, you need a job, and most jobs will require you to have had either real work experience or a graduate degree."

"When you make a commitment to a relationship, you invest your attention and energy in it more profoundly because you now experience ownership of that relationship."

"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 the man hath, his house, his wife, his children."

"A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings."

"In order to experience everyday spirituality, we need to remember that we are spiritual beings spending some time in a human body."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."

"Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?"

"In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations."

"I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult."

"Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience."

"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience."

"To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience."

"The reward of suffering is experience."

"I deepen my experience of God through prayer, meditation, and forgiveness."

"Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to."

"The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world."

"Difficult times always create opportunities for you to experience more love in your life."

"I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it."

"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."

"It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed."

"The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience."

"Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience."

"All theory is against freedom of the will all experience for it."

"It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience."

"I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know."

"But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience."

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others."

"Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life."

"Any experience can be transformed into something of value."

"To have God speak to the heart is a majestic experience, an experience that people may miss if they monopolize the conversation and never pause to hear God's responses."

"I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don't have that experience. My only experience is at losing them."

"A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood."

"Reason, observation, and experience the holy trinity of science."

"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."

"The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision."

"Tactics, fitness, stroke ability, adaptability, experience, and sportsmanship are all necessary for winning."

"Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."

"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."

"I understand now that the vulnerability I've always felt is the greatest strength a person can have. You can't experience life without feeling life. What I've learned is that being vulnerable to somebody you love is not a weakness, it's a strength."

"When we learn from experience, the scars of sin can lead us to restoration and a renewed intimacy with God."

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

"Whatever you dwell on in the conscious grows in your experience."

"I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life."

"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."

"You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape."

"I don't claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I'm home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, 'Through the Year with Jimmy Carter."

"Anybody who has gone through a life-changing experience will tell you there is a different understanding of what is real and what is important, and when you are going through different moments, you can reflect and go, 'I have been through worse."

"My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right."

"But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc."

"Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism."

"But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion."

"Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd."

"All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience."

"Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners."

"As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified."

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

"Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them."

"The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings."

"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality."

"Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception."

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."

"Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn."

"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

"All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions."

"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."

"Historically, musicians know what it is like to be outside the norm - walking the high wire without a safety net. Our experience is not so different from those who march to the beat of different drummers."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."

"The mind is everything. What you think you become."

"Turn your wounds into wisdom."

"We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience."

"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it."

"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally."

"A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer."

"He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions."

"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."

"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."

"Patience is the companion of wisdom."

"Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes."

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."

"Wisdom begins in wonder."