Experience Quotes

Experience has taught me that advertisers get the best results when they pay their agency a flat fee. It is unrealistic to expect your agency to be impartial when its vested interest lies wholly in the direction of increasing your commissionable advertising.
– David M. Ogilvy
Honestly, I have yet to encounter a really bad working experience. Sets are really my favorite places to be because of the many varied and interesting people you get to meet, interact and collaborate with. And I have always developed strong bonds with female costars. No cattiness yet!
– Larisa Oleynik
My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.
– Gene Oliver
The trouble with travelling back later on is that you can never repeat the same experience.
– Michael Palin
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
– Charlie Parker
My wife and sons were all there during the course of my hospitalization; if there was any benefit for me from the experience it was seeing that my sons were everything that I would want my adult children to be. They were very supportive of their mother, unintimidated by the doctors. I couldn't have asked for better.
– Robert Parker
Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
– Blaise Pascal
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.
– M. Scott Peck
It is innocence that is full and experience that is empty. It is innocence that wins and experience that loses.
– Charles Peguy
Tactics, fitness, stroke ability, adaptability, experience, and sportsmanship are all necessary for winning.
– Fred Perry
Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
– Plato
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
– Katherine Anne Porter
Going to a party, for me, is as much a learning experience as, you know, sitting in a lecture.
– Natalie Portman
Film, therefore, is part of society, not distant from it, easy to experience for people regardless of class.
– Mark Poster
The more you achieve, the more interest it should spark to go further, because there's so much - and I don't mean monetarily and I don't mean in society. This whole experience of living is so rich!
– Susan Powter
What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.
– David E. Price
Since everything in life is but an experience perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.
– Long Chen Pa
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
– Katherine Paterson
I could never be with a woman during training. Because my knees would get very weak. My opinion is based on personal experience.
– Floyd Patterson
Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.
– John Portman
We must learn to understand humanity better so that we can create an environment that is more beneficial to people, more rewarding, more pleasant to experience.
– John Portman
In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get - The Future!
– Dan Quayle
I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.
– Dan Rather
There was an instrumentalization by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal, and cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of faith had to be resisted precisely if one wanted to uphold the will of the Council.
– Joseph Ratzinger
However much our late fatalists have boasted of this principle as of a law of nature... I am persuaded that, whenever they shall be pleased to give us any measure of the strength of motives distinct from their prevalence, it will appear, from experience, that the strongest motive does not always prevail.
– Thomas Reid
I have had an experience which might perhaps be described as being shot down. At the same time, I call shot down only when one falls down. Today I got into trouble but I escaped with a whole skin.
– Manfred von Richthofen
Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself, but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of a hit-and-run.
– Branch Rickey
It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people. Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.
– Terry Riley
I'm a musicologist, and I know that this is very rare. As a matter of fact, it's unique in the history of jazz, this group that I'm performing with, this trio. No other trio does these kind of things. I mean, it's an experience you will only hear with this group. It's a one-time experience in life, if you don't come back and hear us again, which would be different anyway.
– Sam Rivers
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.
– Anthony Robbins
Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life's deepest joy: true fulfillment.
– Anthony Robbins
Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.
– Anthony Robbins
Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.
– Jim Rohn
If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
– Philip Roth
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
– Philip Roth
Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
– Joseph Roux
A widow is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practiced coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval.
– Helen Rowland
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
– Muriel Rukeyser
The correct didactic analysis is one that does not in the least differ from the curative treatment. How, indeed, shall the future analyst learn the technique if he does not experience it just exactly as he is to apply it later?
– Otto Rank
I'm developing cross platform now, and I'm as interested in helping as many people as possible to have a better experience when using computers. Morality demands that I write for Wintel machines first (Linux comes along free), and port to Macs when there is time.
– Jef Raskin
That peace which is within us, we must experience it. And if we are searching for peace outside we will never find the peace within.
– Prem Rawal
We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X Prize for the inspiration.
– Burt Rutan
Rather, we ask that the uniqueness of the Iraqi experience be recognized and our newly restored sovereignty respected.
– Jalal Talabani
What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrational needs.
– Richard Taylor
My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.
– Edward Teller
As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.
– Richard Thompson
I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.
– Billy Bob Thornton
Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.
– Harry S. Truman
Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.
– Donald Trump
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
What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked.
– Mark Twain
Armageddon was not an acting experience. That's why I was depressed. It was about the effects and not about the performances. I had the really rough part of being the emotional person who's like, you know, upset all the time.
– Liv Tyler
After each experience, you grow up, you get enriched with something, and you don't know how you're going to be in six months, you don't know what you're going to want, what you're going to need.
– Audrey Tautou
Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.
– Ludwig van Beethoven
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.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Russia was a tremendous experience for me. I've become fluent in Russian and it really broadened my horizons.
– James S. Voss
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
– Denis Waitley
Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.
– Denis Waitley
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.
– Alice Walker
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.
– George Washington
I had a wonderful experience recently in anticipation of the second Rodney King verdict where I decided to do a letter to the community about how I really felt. It's times such as that, that I feel that I'm connecting. And there are other times I'm shocked by what I see and what I discover. And when I'm shocked by it, I think, God, I'm losing it, that I don't really understand what's going on out there.
– Maxine Waters
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
– Edith Wharton
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
– August Wilson
Take jazz or blues; you can't disregard that part of the African-American experience, or even try to transcend it. They are affirmations and celebrations of the value and worth of the African-American spirit. And young people would do well to understand them as the roots of today's rap, rather than some antique to be tossed away.
– August Wilson
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.
– Oprah Winfrey
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.
– Virginia Woolf
Experience needs distance and what you write of at a distance tells not so much what you were like as what you have discovered since.
– David Wade
I assure you that the training that you get in a midget, in a sprint car and perhaps in a Silver Crown car is really the kind of experience that makes you into a damn good race driver.
– Rodger Ward
Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering.
– Naomi Watts
The condition of inebriation is very nearly a universal experience and the words come from all our societal venues-the fraternity house, debutante ball, literary luncheon, longshoreman's bar, the Wild West.
– Bruce Weber
The role we can play every day, if we try, is to take the whole experience of every day and shape it to involve American man. It is our job to interest him in his community and to give his ideas the excitement they should have.
– John Hay Whitney
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
– Benjamin Whorf
I have often thought that however learned you may talk about it, one knows nothing but what he learns from his own experience.
– Christoph Martin Wieland
The rich get richer. Not only because they have surpluses with which to invest, but because of the overriding emotional release they experience from having wealth.
– Stuart Wilde
The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless.
– Emlyn Williams
When you reach the point when the Dilbert cartoons seem exactly to capture your daily experience in corporate life, it is time to move.
– Dave Wilson
We are hungry for more; if we do not consciously pursue the More, we create less for ourselves and make it more difficult to experience More in life.
– Judith Wright
I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.
– Chuck Yeager
Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.
– Chuck Yeager
If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
– Mao Zedong
Learning by experience often is painful- and the more it hurts, the more you learn.
– Ralph Banks
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.
– Helen Keller
Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . [But] the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. . . . [My aim is] to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon [Freud's theories] as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . [Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology] demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality.
– Claude Levi-Strauss
History is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid.
– Livy
All ideas come from sensation or reflection.--Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation, employed either about external 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. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
– John Locke
Legislation, both statutory and constitutional, is enacted, it is true, from an experience of evils but its general language should not, therefore, be necessarily confined to the form that evil had theretofore taken. Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle, to be vital, must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice Marshall, 'designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.' The future is their care, and provision for events of good and bad tendencies of which no prophecy can be made. In the application of a constitution, therefore, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been, but of what may be. Under any other rule a constitution would indeed be as easy of application as it would be deficient in efficacy and power. Its general principles would have little value, and be converted by precedent into impotent and lifeless formulas. Rights declared in words might be lost in reality. And this has been recognized. The meaning and vitality of the Constitution have developed against narrow and restrictive construction.
– Joseph McKenna
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.
– Yehudi Menuhin
If then the power of speech is as great as any that can be named,—if the origin of language is by many philosophers considered nothing short of divine—if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,—if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,—if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and the prophets of the human family—it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others—be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life—who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence.
– John Henry Cardinal Newman
The American Dream [is] one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement . . . It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers . . . It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions.
– Dan Rather
If you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience.
– Edward Vernon Rickenbacker
Anthropology is the only discipline that can access evidence about the entire human experience on this planet.
– Michael Brian Schiffer
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
– Charles Simic
The experience of this sweet life.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita.
– Dante Alighieri
By far the best proof is experience.
– Sir Francis Bacon
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
– Charles Baudelaire
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.
– Sir Arnold Bax
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
– James Boswell