Great Throughts Treasury

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time." - Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

"You are the greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate." - George Matthew Adams

"I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in god - a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge - adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown." -

"Work is the seasoning of experience." -

"While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision." - H. W. Andrews

"This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself." - John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey

"To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience." - Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL

"For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does. " - Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"

"There in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, long-standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge... there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience." - Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"

"Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning." - Gamaliel Bailey

"Four men climbed a mountain to see the view. The first wore new and expensive shoes which did not fit, and he complained constantly of his feet. The second had a greedy eye and kept wishing for this house or that farm. The third saw clouds and worried for fear it might rain. But the fourth really saw the marvelous view. His mountain top experience was looking away from the valley out of which he had just climbed to higher things." - Howard D. Bare

"Before I started on my trip around the world, someone gave me one of the most valuable hints I have ever had. It consists merely in shutting your eyes when you are in the midst of a great moment, or close to some marvel of time or space, and convincing yourself that you are at home again with the experience over and past; and what would you wish most to have examined or done if you could turn time and space back again." - William Beebe, fully Charles William Beebe

"It is a paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self. As a matter of experience, we find that true happiness comes in seeking other things, in the manifold activities of life, in the healthful outgoing of all human powers." - Hugh Black

"Experience is like a pitiless beauty. Years pass before you win her, and by the time she finally surrenders, you have both grown old and no longer need one another." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

"Not years but experiences age us; hence man would be the unhappiest of creatures were he a diligent pupil of experience. That each new generation and each new era starts out from the cradle is what keeps mankind eternally young." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

"All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it." - James Boswell

"Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience." -

"We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we must upon it." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"People have generally three epochs in their confidence in man. In the first they believe him to be everything that is good, and they are lavish with their friendship and confidence. In the next, they have had experience, which has smitten down their confidence, and they; then have to be careful not to mistrust every one, and to put the worst construction upon everything. Later in life, they learn that the greater number of men have much; more good in them than bad, and that even when there is cause to blame, there is more reason to pity than condemn; and then a spirit of confidence again awakens within them." - Frederika Bremer

"While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child's but a man's religion - men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience." - Phillips Brooks

"How willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life and man. But all this grumbling is a vile thing." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Education is anything that we do for the purpose of taking advantage of the experience of some one else." - Lyman Bryson

"The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs of its production." - Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

"The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm." - Horace Bushnell

"Experience has taught me that the only friends we can call our own, who can have no change, are those over whom the grave has closed; the seal of death is the only seal of friendship." -

"A little experience often upsets a lot of theory." - Charles Wakefield Cadman

"A little experience upsets a lot of theory." - S. Parkes Cadman, fully Samuel Parkes Cadman

"Joy is indeed a precious quality which very few experience in their lives. The person who knows how to enjoy life will never grow old no matter how many years he can call his own. It is easy to be happy at specific times, but there is a certain art in being happy and contented every day." - Ora Capelli

"Any place that anyone young can learn something useful from with experience is an educational institution." - Al Capp, full name Alfred Gerald Caplin

"I am of opinion that there are no proverbial sayings which are not true, because they are all sentences drawn from experience itself, who is the mother of all sciences." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost." - William Ellery Channing

"Men who have had a great deal of experience learn not to lose their tempers." - Victor Cherbuliez

"There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature divers seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do by common experience thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness." -

"Man often acquires must so much knowledge as to discover his ignorance, and attains so much experience as to regret his follies, and then dies." - William Benton Clulow

"A prudent person profits from personal experience, a wise one from the experience of others." - Joseph Collins

"If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?" -

"We shall find in the experience of the past, in the observation of the progress that the sciences and civilization have already made, in the analysis of the progress of the human mind and of the development of its faculties, the strongest reasons for believing that nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes." -

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

"The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin." - George William Curtis

"The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language." - Henri Delacroix

""Faith is tendency toward action." According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor... Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority." - John Dewey

"The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality." - John Dewey

"The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation." - Isaac D'Israeli

"It takes a lot of time to get experience, and once you have it you ought to go on using it." - Benjamin Minge Duggar

"A work of art is an experience, a soul message if you like. It is educational, if you insist, but it educates only the psyche which is ripe and ready to submit to its spell. It is never explicit; it preaches, but only in symbolic terms." -

"It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion." - Albert Einstein

"Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought." - Albert Einstein

"The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research." - Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men." - Albert Einstein

"Experience is the common school-house of fools and ill men. Men of wit and honesty be otherwise instructed." -