The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
James A. Baldwin

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
e. e. cummings

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
T. S. Eliot

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
Jonathan Swift

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
Emily Dickinson

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
Lewis Mumford

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce

Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Ambrose Bierce

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Ambrose Bierce

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.
Alfred Adler

The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.
Alfred Adler

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.
Harry S. Truman

The reward of suffering is experience.
Harry S. Truman

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.
Pope John Paul II

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
Franz Kafka

What I got out of it was a great experience working with great people and it becoming a tremendous - basically - a family at the end that none of us wanted to leave.
Shane West

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
Henri Frederic Amiel