Quotes About Experience

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait!—"If youth knew how, and old age could!

War does one good—it teaches people geography.

Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; tragic optimism is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.

Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the slaves of our past.

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give significant form to the chaos of experience?

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.

The world is not "my idea," as Schopenhauer called it; it is a stern reality of which you and I are passing spawns.

To his alert mind and ears, every experience was education.

Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coördinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.

it is a glorious privilege to be alive. Neither scientific analysis nor a multitude of words will describe

custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group.

If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?

a man's maturity pays the price of his youth.

We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.

The simplest meaning of life, then, is joy -- the exhilaration of experience itself, of physical well-being; sheer satisfaction of muscle and sense, of palate and ear and eye. If the child is happier than the man it is because it has more body and less soul, and understands that nature comes before philosophy; it asks for no further meaning to its arms and legs than their abounding use. Perhaps if we used our arms and legs we would be happy too;

What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.