83 Experience Quotes For Inspiration

In the journey of life, our experiences shape who we are and color our perceptions of the world around us. They teach us invaluable lessons, ignite our passions, and sometimes, challenge us in ways we never imagined. While everyone's experiences are uniquely their own, the wisdom gleaned from them can resonate universally, providing inspiration to others. Whether you're reflecting on your own life or seeking motivation for the path ahead, our carefully curated list of the top 83 experience quotes is here to enlighten and inspire. Dive in and discover words that capture the essence of human experience, offering you a fresh perspective and a boost of encouragement.

1. “By seeking and blundering we learn.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. “Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.” - Robert Green Ingersoll

3. “Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away...” - Melvin Burgess

4. “I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.” - Martha Graham

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

6. “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

7. “He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.” - Tim O'Brien

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

9. “We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” - Oscar Wilde

10. “When the image is new, the world is new.” - Gaston Bachelard

11. “I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.” - Martha Washington

12. “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

13. “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

14. “You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).” - Roland Barthes

15. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” - Alan Keightley

16. “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.” - Ivan Illich

17. “Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.” - Michael Joseph Oakeshott

18. “Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.” - Tobias Wolff

19. “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

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

21. “Her maktul katilinde yaşamaya devam eder.” - Elif Şafak

22. “A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.” - L. Frank Baum

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

24. “It’s hardly ever that I am hurt by something in only one dimension.” - Ashly Lorenzana

25. “All knowledge hurts.” - Cassandra Clare

26. “I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.” - Patton Oswalt

27. “I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.” - Robinson Jeffers

28. “The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.” - Haruki Murakami

29. “...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

30. “Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.” - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

31. “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

32. “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” - Alfred North Whitehead

33. “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

34. “Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.” - P.D. James

35. “There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.” - Mitch Albom

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

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

38. “The only true experience is of the immediate present” - Sylvia Clare

39. “Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.” - C. JoyBell C.

40. “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

41. “I consider everything that happened to be precious moments of my life.The pain.The suffering.The fun…And I am here right now, because everyone was there for me.I couldn’t have accomplished anything by standing still, without anybody’s help.I treasure every moment I have spent here.Unlucky?I feel pretty lucky.This is my resolve.”-Sawada Tsunayoshi-” - Sawada Tsunayoshi

42. “Youth is a failing only tooeasily outgrown.” - Agatha Christie

43. “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

44. “True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.” - Tiffany Madison

45. “What is more terrifying-- the things we imagine or the things that are real?” - Suzanne Selfors

46. “Love requires imagination more than experience.” - Simon Van Booy

47. “If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.” - Jonathan D. Spence

48. “You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.” - Tasha Alexander

49. “Patience and persistence are the keys... The keys to unlock doors of success... With these two virtues, you grow in reasoning and experience.” - Ogwo David Emenike

50. “Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

51. “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

52. “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

53. “It has been my experience that those who claim to be the most spiritual are usually the least so.” - Steve Maraboli

54. “Make sure your business is creating a service experience so good that it demands loyalty.” - Steve Maraboli

55. “The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.” - Ouida

56. “Cunoștințele sunt cele care se adună în capul nostru fără să ne fie întotdeauna de vreun folos. Cunoașterea e transformarea unor cunoștințe într-o experiență de viață.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

57. “I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.” - Roman Payne

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

59. “Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.” - Andrew Zimmern

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

61. “Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?” - Elisabeth Elliot

62. “God impressed me with this a long time ago: 'Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you!'."~R. Alan Woods [1998]” - R. Alan Woods

63. “...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...” - John Geddes

64. “Life truly is precious. Gather every moment of it into your arms & embrace it.” - Paula Abdul

65. “You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.” - Megan Stack

66. “Déjà vu is more than just that fleeting moment of surprise, instantly forgotten because we never bother with things that make no sense. It show that time doesn't pass. It's a leap into something we have already experienced and that is being repeated.” - Paulo Coelho

67. “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

68. “Life was never intended to consist of a glut of luxury, be an easy course, or filled only with success. There are those games which we lose, those races in which we finish last, and those promotions which never come. Such experiences provide an opportunity for us to show our determination and to rise above disappointment.” - Thomas S. Monson

69. “We've been had.” - Rosen Topuzov

70. “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

71. “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

72. “[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” - Flannery O'Connor

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

74. “Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts.” - Larry Atchley Jr.

75. “Have you ever felt love?Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?” - Derrick Jensen

76. “A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.” - W. Somerset Maugham

77. “Focus on what's ahead. Use what is behind.” - Donita K. Paul

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Explore, experience, evolve, and exceed your expectations! - No Excuses!” - Lorii Myers

83. “Laziness always wins.” - Tibor Fischer