Great Throughts Treasury

"Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small." -

"Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions - these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term “experience.”" - George Henry Lewes

"Science is the systematic classification of experience." - George Henry Lewes

"God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way." -

"The artist is one to whom all experience is revelation." - Ludwig Lewisohn

"Wherever deep experience attains intense expression, there is art." - Ludwig Lewisohn

"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true, or becomes true within certain limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind. There are no limits." - John Lilly, fully John Cunningham Lilly``

"Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others." - Walter Lippmann

"A divine power, mystery, delight, love - and a host of other unquantifiables - are personal realities proven only by themselves, by experience. Even scientific terms such as randomness hint at something ultimately unprovable by strictly scientific means. The phenomena encompass the discipline, not vice versa." - Stuart Litvak and A. Wayne Senzee

"Experience is the teacher of fools." - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL

"Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking." - John Locke

"It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, stamped, as it were, upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show how many men obtain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any such innate impressions... Let us suppose the mind to be a blank tablet; how comes it to be furnished? To this answer in one word, from experience." - John Locke

"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." - John Locke

"On one level, life is the process of seeking out and enjoying experiences - from the transcendent to the tragic. Life has as cyclical pattern of movement and appreciation; even when you’re not doing anything, you’re probably in a situation you sought. On another level, life is the experience of the self’s interaction with the world. The self can be broken down into three main elements and their corresponding activities: first, the heart (knowing compassion, receiving and giving love); second, the intellect (acquiring and digesting information); third, the senses (acting and being acted upon). It is the soul, however, that focuses and inspires all three the soul gives us resilience -an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship... The meaning of life can’t be understood without first looking at the self and its interaction with the world. In effect, this amounts to examining the inner workings of the soul of the universe." - Wynton Marsalis

"Waste not your strength trying to push shut doors which God is opening. Neither wear yourself out in keeping open doors which ought to be forever sealed. Some episode in your life, over which you are anxious, is closed. it is in the past. Whatever its memory, you cannot change it. But you can shut the door. Go into some silent place of thought. Test your self-respect. Ask your soul, "Have I emerged from this experience with honor, or if not, can honor be retrieved?" And if your soul answers, "Yes," close then the door to that Past; hang a garland over the portal if you will, but come away without tarrying. The east is aflame with the radiance of the morning, and before you stands many another door, held open by the hand of God." - Oscar Edward Maurer

"Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go... To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"Wisdom comes not from experience but from meditating on experience and assimilating it." - Joy Elmer Morgan

"I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life." - Melvin L. Morse

"The experience of life nearly always works toward the confirmation of faith. It is the total significance of life that it reveals God to man; and life only can do this; neither thought, nor demonstration, nor miracle, but only life, weaving its threads of daily toil and trial and joy into a pattern on which, at last, is inscribed the name of "God."" - Theodore T. Munger

"[There are] four destructive effects of religious and therapeutic disciplines: 1) A practice can reinforce limiting traits, preventing their removal or transformation. 2) A practice can support limiting beliefs, giving them greater power in the life of an individual or culture. 3) A practice can subvert balanced growth by emphasizing some virtues at the expense of others. 4) A practice can limit integral development when it focuses on partial though authentic experience of superordinary reality." - Michael Murphy

"Time is change - on all sorts of different scales; and the phenomenal world is made up of this continual changing, at different rates, of everything, like an enormous clock full of wheels. Outside, there is this stream of becoming; and within, a stream of ever-changing thoughts and feelings, a succession of different I’s, of fragmentary bits of ourselves - an inner world of becoming in which nothing is, in which we possess nothing and do not possess ourselves. We think of all this changing in time as progress; and not only do we have this extraordinary and absurd illusion, but we imagine that the stability that we all secretly crave can be sought for in all this machinery of change, in the turning wheels of this enormous clock. But we know that what is stable was always beyond time... The real distinction, therefore, between time and eternity is qualitative and so must lie in the realm of psychological experience." - Maurice Nicoll

"We find the attribute of unchangingness always associated with the highest level of conscious experience. The experiences of truth are always similar. There is the changing mind, following time and change; and the unchanging mind behind it. There is the order of natural reasoning that goes with changing phenomena, and another above... The source of all truth lies in ‘unchangeable truth’ which is above the level of reason, and it is the internal perception of this unchangeable truth that endows man with the highest grade of being." - Maurice Nicoll

"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"He who thinks much and to some purpose easily forgets his own experiences but not the thoughts each experience provoked." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." - Charlie Parker, born Charles Parker, aka Bird

"The fine art of teaching is so to guide the growth of the learner that after each experience he is one step closer to maturity." -

"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." -

"Life is an adventure in experience, and when you are no longer greedy for the last drop of it, it means no more than that you have set your face... to the day when you shall depart." - Donald Culross Peattie

"Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord. Violence has ever achieved only destruction, not construction; the kindling of passions, not their pacification; the accumulation of hate and destruction, not the reconciliation of the contending parties; and it has reduced men and parties to the difficult task of building slowly after sad experience on the ruins of discord." - Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL

"Law is experience developed by reason and applied continually to further experience." - Roscoe Pound, fully Nathan Roscoe Pound

"In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept." -

"War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories, the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war." -

"The pleasure of love is in loving, and we are made happier by the passion that we experience than by that which we inspire." -

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." - Auguste Rodin, fully François-Auguste-René Rodin

"I have learned by experience that no man’s character can be eventually injured but by his own acts." -

"If we recognize love, it is by its beauty. If we recognize truth, it is by its beauty. The meaning of life is beauty. When we sense and experience beauty, we are looking straight into the face of the Creator. We achieve transcendent union with the mind of God. We were born to be aware of it and to create more of it." - Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren

"Experience suggests that the first rule of politics is never to say never. The ingenious human capacity for maneuver and compromise may make acceptable tomorrow what seems outrageous or impossible today." - William V. Shannon, fully William Vincent Shannon

"Those who obtain riches by labor, care, and watching, know their value. Those who impart them to sustain and extend knowledge, virtue, and religion, know their use. Those who lose them by accident or fraud know their vanity. And those who experience the difficulties and dangers of preserving them know their perplexities." - Charles Simmons

"Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being." - O. J. Simon

"It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men, the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up and growing at length into a mighty pyramid." - Samuel Smiles

"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"If the body is only the vehicle by which the soul can access the experience of physical living, then there is no real physical me. The soul (or life force) is the only real me. If you and I (the souls) want to achieve the most from this earthly lifetime, the more varied the experiences we should seek. That said, it’s too easy for you and me to fall into a comfort zone and try to avoid change. To keep this from happening, the experiences change rapidly as a result of the body moving from infancy though old age. The physical changes help to enhance our learning curve, our ability to serve, and our chance to evolve." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation." -

"To experience religion is to experience the truth of the great doctrines of divine grace." - Ichabod Smith Spencer

"Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power of men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more easily than their words." -

"If this is correct, all that is contained in a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave. When the lower level streams of experience which correspond to the basic items postulated in physics enter into appropriately complex relations with each other they form aggregates (and aggregates of aggregates) which are what living things are in themselves, and which underpin the emergence of the streams of consciousness of animals and men. Within such streams of consciousness, more particularly the human, a not self aspect, which is primarily the physical world as it is for us, confronts a self aspect, and serves as its representation of the system of interweaving streams of experience n the midst of which it exists and with which it must interact appropriately in order to survive, communicate with other similar selves, and realize its personal essence as fully as it can." - Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge

"How many persons fancy they have experience simply because they have grown old!" -

"I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances." - Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon

"Human wisdom is the aggregate of all human experience, constantly accumulating, selecting and reorganizing its own materials." - Joseph Story