Quotes About Experience

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

Very different conditions of life confronted them from those we face, but it is ever to be borne in mind that though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: 'God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.' (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. A great and lonely thinker. Only

The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.

And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn- you sometimes lose track of the beginning.

Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.

And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ...

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.

The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

Do you know — I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I — it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again .

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.

Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.

life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. (The Triumph Of The Night)

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes

At least, she continued, it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself -- she drew together her troubled brows -- but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.

he was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.