Quotes About Experience

no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.

More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.

Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.

He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...

During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one's feet.

She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.

It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive ...

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

Each time you happen to me all over again

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

There is an air of plausibility which accompanies vulgar reasonings and notions, taken from the beaten circle of ordinary experience, that is admirably suited to the narrow capacities of some, and to the laziness of others.

Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us [...], because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Both the Sublime and the Beautiful induce a state of submission that is often combined with the possibility of getting lost. They disorientate and undermine purpose. In one of several erotic sections in the Enquiry Burke describes the experience of looking at a beautiful woman's body: it is, he writes, like a 'deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried'. It

Those who always labour, can have no true judgment.

Later he wrote to Lodge: I don't grudge the broken arm a bit...I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

It has been objected that I am a boy," said Roosevelt wearily—he had been hearing the charge for years—"but I can only offer the time-honored reply, that years will cure me of that." He