Quotes about experience

Reflect, ye gentle dames, that much they know,

Who gain experience from another's woe.

Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all; when it first appears we can at least prevent its further growth. But do not on this account waste your breath on empty arguments to prove to the youth that he is like other men and subject to the same weaknesses. Make him feel it or he will never know it.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

... only he who has been bitten by a serpent knows the suffering of one who has been bitten by a serpent.

Whatever the art or whatever the craft—and make a note of this before you go—talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.

His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.

In war you learn thoroughly, but the tuition fees are high.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

He didn’t have “instincts”, he had thirty years of experience—which was much more reliable.

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing.

"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and unsatisfactory, really—although it looks so nice."