Quotes About Experience

At Disneyland they charge you as an adult when you're ten.

This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.

It often seemed to Jake that wisdom had settled on his own head like a wreath from heaven some time around age sixty, after it was too late to do him much good and was more of an irritation than a pleasure.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

The same self-reinforcing tendency that perpetuates an attitude can also magnify attitude changes--particularly in the negative direction. A single bad experience can frighten you so that you get a negative feeling each time you encounter anything related to the cause of the bad experience.

Life does not follow the continuous flow of logical argument and that one often has to risk moving beyond the limits of the rational in order to live life to the fullest.

Intellect is not wisdom.

Happiness is... usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

If travel expands our experience and broadens our minds, the anticipation of travel helpfully narrows our reading list.

I always tell travel writing students to use these early hours to explore, because one's surroundings—the colorful drinks, the melodic sirens, the sweet-and-foul smells—will not be as clear or as sharp in a few days. At the start, everything stands out as if in high definition, especially, strangely, if you're groggy from jet lag or insomnia.

After half a day in a place—especially a foreign country—you've learned more than from all the books and articles you've read.

The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

The stupid neither forgive or forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

He picked up a handful of grass and squeezed it in his fingers, letting the blades fall back to the ground, two or three at a time. It felt cold and wiry.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do whine, For the next as a pearl in the world they do shine, For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve, For the next matrons or drudges they serve, For the next doth crave a staff for a stay, For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Childhood is a period of transitory psychosis.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested

It'd take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo. An' even den, yuh wouldn't know it all. Only the dead know Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.

One learns more from listening than speaking.And both the wind and the people who continue to live close to nature still have much to tell us which we cannot hear within university walls.

Those who have experienced the most, have suffered so much that they have ceased to hate. Hate is more for those with a slightly guilty conscience, and who by chewing on old hate in times of peace wish to demonstrate how great they were during the war.