116 Experience Quotes

In the journey of life, experiences shape our understanding, growth, and perspective. They are the invaluable moments that teach us lessons, enrich our souls, and contribute to our personal narratives. This collection of the top 116 experience quotes encapsulates the wisdom, reflections, and insights drawn from various paths. Whether you're seeking inspiration, comfort, or a fresh outlook, these quotes will resonate with the complexities and beauty of our shared human experiences. Dive in and let these words guide you through the myriad phases of your life's adventure.

1. “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. “Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

3. “He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.” - Cormac McCarthy

4. “Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.” - Victoria Holt

5. “You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.” - Mary Tyler Moore

6. “I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just...in between.” - Jim Morrison

7. “Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” - Randy Pausch

8. “A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.” - Lemony Snicket

9. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” - Truman Capote

10. “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” - John Dewey

11. “Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices--just recognize them.” - Edward R. Murrow

12. “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” - Aldous Huxley

13. “If we can just let go and trust that things will work out they way they're supposed to, without trying to control the outcome, then we can begin to enjoy the moment more fully. The joy of the freedom it brings becomes more pleasurable than the experience itself.” - Goldie Hawn

14. “Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” - Thomas Paine

16. “Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17. “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.” - Orson F. Whitney

18. “The master of the garden is the one who waters it, trims the branches, plants the seeds, and pulls the weeds. If you merely stroll through the garden, you are but an acolyte.” - Vera Nazarian

19. “Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.” - Nicholas Sparks

20. “One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.” - Jane Hirshfield

21. “Refuser de faire quelque chose parce qu'on l'a déjà fait, parce qu'on a déjà vécu l'expérience, conduit rapidement à une destruction, pour soi-même comme pour les autres, de toute raison de vivre comme de tout futur possible, et vous plonge dans un ennui pesant qui finit par se transformer en une amertume atroce, accompagnée de haine et de rancoeur à l'égard de ceux qui appartiennent encore à la vie.” - Michel Houellebecq

22. “I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.” - Azar Nafisi

23. “To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” - Christopher Hitchens

24. “only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

25. “most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

26. “Good morning," said the little prince.Good morning," said the merchant.This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"Anything you like..."As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

27. “This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.” - Virginia Woolf

28. “Sometimes you have to steer away from the crowd in order to be a better person. It's not always easy, that's for sure. But it's right. And sometimes doing the right thing feels good, even if it does end up in a trip to the principal's office.” - Simone Elkeles

29. “Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.” - Kay Redfield Jamison

30. “This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore nil desperandum. March forward hero!” - Sivananda

31. “The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.” - Brooks Atkinson

32. “...ordinary experience has to be made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection.” - Shoshana Zuboff

33. “It's only natural to feel lonely after the enjoyable moments pass. But as you experience new joys those feelings of sorrow will start to fade.” - Mizu Sahara

34. “You need to screw up to learn. You need to experience to create greatness.” - laurie faria stolarz

35. “I stepped from Plank to PlankSo slow and cautiouslyThe Stars about my Head I felt,About my Feet the Sea.I knew not but the nextWould be my final inch —This gave me that precarious GaitSome call Experience.” - Emily Dickinson

36. “The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.” - Paul Brunton

37. “You gotta be in the NOW to create and experience the WOW!” - Steve Maraboli

38. “We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.” - Michael Ondaatje

39. “Kim olursak olalım, dünyanın hangi yerinde yaşarsak yaşayalım, ta derinlerde bir yerde hepimiz bir eksiklik duygusu taşımaktayız. Sanki temel bir şeyimizi kaybetmişiz de geri alamamaktan korkuyoruz. Neyin eksik olduğunu bilenimizde hakikaten çok az.” - Elif Şafak

40. “God help us for we knew the worst too young.” - Rudyard Kipling

41. “But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” - Immanuel Kant

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

43. “In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.” - May Sarton

44. “I believe in energies. Good energy has served me well. Being fair with others, compassionate towards them, remaining humble, and making a difference to someone are just a few of the things that I have seen create good energy. Beautiful things. Human things. I do my best to surround myself with these types of things, to generate an atmosphere thick with such energy. It has kept me safe in many situations. I have taken risks in the past, and managed to avoid harm by the protection of the good energy I have created around me. I believe that ugliness creates more ugliness. And no matter how touched by ugliness you are, you do not have to give in to it and start spreading it beyond yourself. I have seen this sickness and what it does to a person, and those around them.” - Ashly Lorenzana

45. “Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.” - George Eliot

46. “Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.” - Bertrand Russell

47. “If at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing it wrong. Learn from the experience. Try again, but with a different approach.” - Steve Maraboli

48. “I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.” - Ashly Lorenzana

49. “If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.” - Phil Lesh

50. “...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.” - Chris Crutcher

51. “I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.” - Dara Torres

52. “Used a replica gun to steal a replica sportscar and experienced a replica of remorse” - steve aylett

53. “To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

54. “It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)” - Hermann Hesse

55. “We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.” - Michael Chabon

56. “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.” - Oscar Wilde

57. “Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.” - Louise Erdrich

58. “Our consiousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.” - George Eliot

59. “Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.” - Milan Kundera

60. “When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.” - John Gardner

61. “You had a near life experience.” - Chuck Palahniuk

62. “Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.” - Tom Stoppard

63. “But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.” - James Baldwin

64. “Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.” - Criss Jami

65. “One of the greatest gifts from God is the eternal perspective. It is a level of fearlessness, a level of understanding where one can experience even emotional harmony with God.” - Criss Jami

66. “Good judgment comes from bad experience. Unfortunately, most of that comes from bad judgment.- Tara Daniels -” - Jill Shalvis

67. “Yeah, that’s my experience. Humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful, innocent way and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite—it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have like eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to a chiropractor to get a readjustment. That’s me in Africa, that’s me in Southeast Asia. You come back humbled and you bring that into your life. It’s made me much more tolerant of other peoples—and I’m not saying I used to be a misogynist, or I used to be a racist, that was never my problem. But I can be extremely headstrong, impatient, rude. Like, “Hurry up, man. What’s your problem? Get out of my way.” That sentiment comes easy to me. Going to these countries, you realize none of that is necessary, none of it’s cool, it’s nothing Abraham Lincoln would do, and so why are you doing it? Those are the lessons I’ve learned.” - Henry Rollins

68. “Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.” - Josh Gates

69. “When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.” - Quin Hillyer

70. “Even knowing that my presence brought a shadow over the lives of my loved ones, I can't regret the experiences I've had with them. They gave me life, becoming an integral part of my soul. They healed me when I was broken and somehow they recovered those parts of me, I thought lost forever.” - J.D. Stroube

71. “Now? I'm just another female faking orgasms to make a man not feel so inadequate.” - Jess C. Scott

72. “His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.” - Richard L. Brandt

73. “Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.” - Michael Chabon

74. “In God's economy, nothing is slag, nothing is wasted. Every relationship we build is a teacher, every experience we have is a coach. In every scar there is a lesson. In every memory there lives potential to make more.” - Toni Sorenson

75. “I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.” - Graham Greene

76. “He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.” - Thomas Wolfe

77. “Si je rencontrerais ajourd'hui, je lui filerais une grande claque pour le punir de m'avoir maudite en me souhaitant des expériences. Et je pleurerais sur son épaule, pour des tas de raisons. Pas parce qu'il ne m'a pas épousée, mais à cause de toutes les désillusions qui sont venues avec mes expériences.” - Agathe Hochberg

78. “He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.” - Michael Morpurgo

79. “Experience prefers humility.” - Toba Beta

80. “Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.” - Alain De Botton

81. “Behold yon rough and flinty roadWhere youth, now youth no more,Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loavesHe cast away of yore.” - Emma Ghent Curtis

82. “People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.” - Ashly Lorenzana

83. “Life is sweet or bitter depending on where your attention is, at that moment.” - George Alexiou

84. “Living erotically is opening oneself up to nature-- externally and within.” - Kristie LeVangie

85. “Strange how something good can come from something horrible.” - Jennifer L. Armentrout

86. “You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...” - Jane Devin

87. “You have to live to really know things, my love” - Dan Simmons

88. “The years teach us much, which the days never knew.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

89. “Rise to the challenge of bringing your dreams to life! Do not be discouraged by resistance, be nourished by it. Success is the experience of rising to the level of your true greatness.” - Steve Maraboli

90. “When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.” - Robert McKee

91. “If you buy your experience it's your own. So it's no matter how much you pay for it.” - L.M. Montgomery

92. “I believe in me. And my family does. And Mrs. V. It's the rest of the world I'm not so sure of.” - Sharon M. Draper

93. “If we can widen the range of experiences beyond what we as individuals have encountered, if we can draw upon the experiences of others who've had to confront comparable situations in the past, then - although there are no guarantees - our chances of acting wisely should increase proportionately.” - Edward Hallett Carr

94. “You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.” - Bill Buford

95. “Experience teaches is such a lovely saying. However, when people try not to make the mistakes of what history and experience has taught, they are criticized for it. They are told that because they have not experienced it, they cannot appreciate it, and thus never know it. However, at the same time, people want you to learn from past mistakes and past experiences, in order to make a better choice for yourself. So let me ask you, which is the hypocrite? Is it history or is it today?” - Lionel Suggs

96. “You have to be silent, but ready” - Rosen Topuzov

97. “We've been had.” - Rosen Topuzov

98. “a man only knows what he's experienced” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

99. “Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

100. “I figure we go through things that make us stronger, but we also go through things that just simply piss us off.” - Meg Winkler

101. “Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. [...] - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.” - Karen Blixen

102. “Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

103. “You and I have been created with a DNA that drives us to want to live a life with good experiences, forces us to human growth and leads us to the contribution of something beyond our understanding.” - Yovanny Alfonso

104. “when you fall into a pit, you either die or get out.” - fitri puji astutik

105. “Many times what we perceive as an error or failure is actually a gift. And eventually we find that lessons learned from that discouraging experience prove to be of great worth.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

106. “Más realidades hay en la experiencia que en la mejor de las teorías.” - Fernando Araya

107. “The real success is experiencing the bitters of life rather more than sweets.” - Dirah

108. “Knowing that you are perfect as you are does not mean you will no longer grow. It means that everything you've experienced up to this moment has made you who you are, and that is perfection. Tomorrow, you will be an even more perfect version of yourself.” - Julie-Anne

109. “There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more.” - Israelmore Ayivor

110. “God, he was probably too young to be this old, but life had a way of being about experience, rather than calendar days.” - J.R. Ward

111. “Experience is the best teacher.” - Van.C.L

112. “Travel Moulds A Man,People Mould His Wisdom And Experiences Mould His LIFE...!” - Sujit Lalwani

113. “A bitter experience makes us a better person.” - Saru Singhal

114. “He had strong, steady hands, and I could tell from looking at them there was little he couldn't do. Mossy always said you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his hands. Some hands, she told me, were leaving hands. They were the wandering sort that slipped into places they shouldn't, and they would wander right off again because those hands just couldn't stay still. Some hands were worthless hands, fit only to hold a drink or flick ash from a cigar, and some were punishing hands that hit hard and didn't leave a mark and those were the ones you never stayed to see twice.But the best hands were knowing hands, Mossy told me with a slow smile. Knowing hands were capable; they could soothe a horse or woman. They could take things apart -- including your heart -- and put them back together better than before. Knowing hands were rare, but if you found them, they were worth holding, at least for a little while.” - Deanna Raybourn

115. “Laziness always wins.” - Tibor Fischer

116. “Experience can not be improvise” - Natalia Lizardo