The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
Flannery O'Connor

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
W. H. Auden

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.
Benjamin Disraeli

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.
Rita Mae Brown

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.
Benjamin Disraeli

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
John Ruskin

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Ray Bradbury

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
Roger Bacon

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
Roger Bacon

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.
Bertrand Russell

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James

To have God speak to the heart is a majestic experience, an experience that people may miss if they monopolize the conversation and never pause to hear God's responses.
Charles Stanley

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
George Eliot

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?
George Eliot

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
George Eliot

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.
Ludwig van Beethoven