We all know that experience is the best teacher. But sometimes, it’s hard to see the lessons in difficult experiences. These quotes about experience can help you reflect on your own journey and see how you’ve grown from tough times. They offer wisdom and guidance, proving that everything happens for a reason and that we can learn from even the hardest seasons of life. So read on to be inspired and motivated to keep growing through your experiences!
Quotes About Experience
I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.
Henry Ford
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller
We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.
Henry David Thoreau
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
Everything you have done and been through is valuable and important. In order to be who you are, to know what you know, to be where you are in this moment, you needed to go through what you went through.
Iyanla Vanzant
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Albert Camus
Any experience good or bad can have value. Unlocking that value is determined by our choices.
Mark Manson
Experience is the teacher of all things.
Julius Caesar
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
Experience – the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Jules Verne
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Aldous Huxley
Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.
Heinrich Heine
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.
John Keats
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
Henry Adams
If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.
Sydney Banks
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
Henry Miller
Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life’s deepest joy: true fulfillment.
Tony Robbins
I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
William Stafford
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Eckhart Tolle
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
John Keats
Experience may teach us what is, but never that it cannot be otherwise.
Immanuel Kant
All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
Karl Kraus
If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we’d all be millionaires.
Abigail Van Buren
My experience tells me the hard road is almost always the right road.
Shahid Khan
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
Helen Keller
All i have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O’Connor
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Auguste Rodin
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Khalil Gibran
The only source of knowledge is experience.
Albert Einstein
The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.
Henry David Thoreau
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.
Henry Ford
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.
Timothy Leary
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust
Experience does not err; only your judgements err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
Leonardo da Vinci
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Antrim
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
Leonardo da Vinci
The years teach much which the days never know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Information’s pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
Clarence Day
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Ansel Adams
I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.
Jean Houston
To change your responses.
Jack Canfield
We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.
T. S. Eliot
You only have control over three things in your life — the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior). How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don’t like what you are producing and experiencing, you have to change your responses.
Jack Canfield
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
William Osler
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James
Don’t just learn something from every experience, learn something positive.
Al Neuharth
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can’t retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.
Bernard Baruch
If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Heywood
Pure love is who you are! When you express pure love, you give yourself the direct experience of who you are. It is the greatest gift! It looks as if your giving a gift to others, and you are giving it to yourself, that is because there is no one else in the room, it only looks as if there is.
Neale Donald Walsch
Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
M. Scott Peck
Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
Oscar Wilde
The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
Elliot W. Eisner
A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one’s own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.
Heinz Pagels
May seem to be.
John Heywood
I never learned from a man who agreed with me.
Robert A. Heinlein
Tell me and i forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Xunzi
Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.
Paulo Coelho
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.
Walter Benjamin
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
Andre Gide
Having an experience is taking part in the world. Taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility.
Olafur Eliasson
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
You will not experience all life has to offer you or begin to experience life at its fullest as long as you are satisfied with mediocrity. You have to be disgusted with your current circumstances before your circumstances can change.
Eric Thomas
I have absolutely no fear of death. From my near-death research and my personal experiences, death is, in my judgment, simply a transition into another kind of reality.
Raymond Moody
Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.
Tal Ben-Shahar
I think we are a product of all our experiences.
Sanford I. Weill
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams
When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.
Henry David Thoreau
Don’t be so bitter about a bad experience from your past that you miss the opportunities in front of you.
Robert Kiyosaki
Everything is falling together perfectly, even though it looks as if some things are falling apart. Trust in the process you are now experiencing.
Neale Donald Walsch
As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.
Edward Witten
As you awaken to your divine nature, you’ll begin to appreciate beauty in everything you see, touch and experience.
Wayne Dyer
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius
The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.
Sidney Jourard
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
Eudora Welty
There are no real successes without rejection. The more rejection you get, the better you are, the more you’ve learned, the closer you are to your outcome… If you can handle rejection, you’ll learn to get everything you want.
Tony Robbins
In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.
J. Paul Getty
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.
Henry David Thoreau
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.
Charles de Lint
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Karl Marx
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
Jorge Luis Borges
Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
Raymond Aron
Mistakes – call them unexpected learning experiences.
Richard Bach
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
John Locke
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you: You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth are the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
Bruce Mau
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
The most important knowledge teachers need to do good work is a knowledge of how students are experiencing learning and perceiving their teacher’s actions.
Stephen Brookfield
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
Ram Dass
The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Niccolo Machiavelli
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
Henry Ford
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.
Doug Larson
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future by the past.
Patrick Henry
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Hal Borland
Not surprisingly, the place we’re most likely to experience testing is exactly where we struggle most to trust God.
Bruce Wilkinson
No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.
Paulo Freire
…talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.
Patrick Süskind
By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.
Irvine Welsh
Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.
Victoria Holt
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.
Livy
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude.
Denis Waitley
It is highly possible that what is called ‘talented behavior’ is simply a greater individual capacity for experiencing. From this point of view, it is in the increasing of the individual capacity for experiencing that the untold potentiality of a personality can be evoked.
Viola Spolin
It’s important to know that at the end of the day it’s not the medals you remember. What you remember is the process — what you learn about yourself by challenging yourself, the experiences you share with other people, the honesty the training demands — those are things nobody can take away from you whether you finish twelfth or you’re an Olympic Champion.
Silken Laumann
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
John Milton
We are older by faith than by experience.
Henry David Thoreau
What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Certain experiences you can’t survive, and afterward you don’t fully exist, even if you failed to die.
Nic Pizzolatto
Use whatever excuse you can to vibrate in harmony with those things you’ve been saying you want. And when you do, those things that are a vibrational equivalent flow into your experience in abundance. Not because you deserve it, not because you’ve earned it, but because it’s the natural consequence of the Law of Attraction. That which is like unto itself is drawn.
Esther Hicks
For perfect love casteth out fear, and fear can only be from the material things that soon must fade away. And thus hold to the higher thought of eternity. For life is a continual experience.
Edgar Cayce
The training is a set of interpersonal interactions that lead to emotional and intellectual experiences that provide a circumstance and an intrument for self awareness, self observation and reflection on the circumstances of the subject trainee, both in his individual life and as a social being.
Humberto Maturana
Parting Words
Experience is one of the most underrated teachers in life. It can be hard to learn from experience, but those who do often find themselves evolving into better people. These quotes about experience will help you reflect on your own journey and appreciate the lessons that have come along with it. What’s your favorite quote about experience? Leave a comment and let us know.
P.S. You might also like these related quote collections:
- Quotes About Memories
- Quotes About Reflection
- Quotes About Finding Yourself
- Quotes About Self Actualization
- Quotes About Moments
Originally Published: November 7, 2022
✍️ Cusco, Peru
