Quotes About Experience

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice. Two

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.

There are gains for all our losses, There are balms for all our pain: But when youth, the dream, departs, It takes something from our hearts, And it never comes again.

It is maintained by some that travel has no educational value, that a person with sensibility can gain as rich an experience of life by staying right where he is as by wandering around the world, and that a person with no sensibility may as well remain at home anyway. To me this is nonsense, for if one is a bore, I maintain that it is better to be a bore about Peshawar than Upper Tooting.

In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.

A life takes as long as it takes to bring us to our truth, even if we only make it to our death bed.

Cowper invented the idea of the 'armchair traveller': 'My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.'90

Wielding a hammer, however, you're at the very heart of the experience, being flooded with wonderful sensations that simply can't be yours if you use a firearm. Now, you might be asking yourself how I came to discover the splendors of hammer attack. I'll tell you. You won't want to hear it, though.

The great times are often that way. In the middle of everything, you suddenly realize that you're having a perfect, golden experience. And you realize how few they are. And how this one is bound to end too soon. You know that it will always be a wonderful memory, that the loss of it will give you a soft ache in the heart. This

T]here is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.

indeed I often dream of it, and I can still feel how I felt, as though I was still small, and all those people were still alive. It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they'd been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.

Con qué rapidez se acepta lo increíble si se ve con frecuencia!

That's my job; to bring adventure into your life.

Each man's life is a tome of episodes. Consider all the moments of your life enumerated one by one with full description.

I have to confess that, in the years I have spent as a schoolteacher, I have learned much more from my students than they have from me. While that will surely sound like a feigned humility, it isn't feigned, and it isn't humility either.

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats.

We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their water.

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

What little we knew about grownups didn't seem to cover Grandma.

I was getting long in the leg but still short on experience.

Someday you'll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.