Experience

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

"The dog [in Pavlovs experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock."

"Behold, we live through all things,—famine, thirst, Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery, All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst On soul and body,—but we cannot die, Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,— Lo, all things can be borne!"

"Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things."

"You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson."

"Experience seems to be like the shining of a bright lantern. It suddenly makes clear in the mind what was already there perhaps, but dim."

"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."

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

"By experience we find out a shorter way by a long wandering. Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty."

"Nam in omnibus fere minus valent præcepta quam experimenta."

"In her experience all her friends relied, Heaven was her help and nature was her guide."

"Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair."