Quotes About Experience

have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.

Experience teaches us that men who are equally wise and good may differ in political as well

If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind. Jefferson

There's something about the transporting capacity of music, something about it's odd but undeniable ability to create a collective experience by firing our individual imaginations, that's more likely to open our minds and our hearts to competing points of view.

His experience of the past two decades in foreign policy had also taught him that time often resolved the issues of the hour.

You've just got to pick the man you think is best on the basis of his past history

enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his

Son," Johnson said, "I've served in the House. And I've been privileged to serve in the Senate, too. And they're both good places to serve. So I wouldn't begin to advise you what to do, except to say this—that the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." The former president paused. "Do I make my point?

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

He had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn't kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.

Urban Americans lost the tactile experience of raising food. They neither heard the squeals, nor smelled he offal, nor saw the blood, nor tasted the rage when predators swallowed a cherished investment.

As I followed Mr. Harrison, I picked up his salty, sweet odor—it pervaded the whole apartment actually—and I liked it. It smelled alive.

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply what has taken you so long to learn.

I think we love differently every day. Like the guy who said you can't stand in a river at exactly the same place twice. Today I love you differently than yesterday, or will tomorrow.

In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it. The

Loving's not the question— living is. Love builds the house, but then you got to furnish it.

Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.

it's their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

It quite spoiled my war.' 'You say that almost as if you'd been enjoying it,' said Michael. 'But of course I was enjoying it,' said Tabitha, smiling. 'We all were. It's so hard for you young people to understand, I know, but there's nothing like a good war for pulling a country together. Everyone was so nice to each other, for a while. Everything that had divided us suddenly seemed so petty and inconsequential.

The deceitfulness of the heart of man appears in no one thing so much as this of spiritual pride and self-righteousness. The subtlety of Satan appears in its height, in his managing persons with respect to this sin. And perhaps one reason may be that here he has most experience; he knows the way of its coming in; he is acquainted with the secret springs of it: it was his own sin. Experience gives vast advantage in leading souls, either in good or evil.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live... - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

He was realizing too late that old people weren't entirely stupid.