Quotes About Experience

Opinions are like money. No matter how much you know, there's always someone who knows more.

Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.

Mastery begins when formal education ends.

When you have bacon in your mouth, it doesn't matter who's president.

I don't care who you are, is smart enough to just dole out advice. Just talk about your own experiences and what you did to help yourself.

Every day I seek out mentors: people who have great experience to help me, particularly in areas I am new to, excited about, and know nothing about.

People do what they want until they are injured like a kid putting his fingers on the stove.

Believe it or not, sometimes it's just as good (often better) to read all of their materials rather than be directly mentored.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

You don't know, and there's no way in the world for you to find out, what it's like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you.

Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

We're getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn't take long.