experience

The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they must and should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.

—Heidegger, Martin

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby†he has slowlyaccumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

—Huxley,T(homas) H(enry)

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtletyand precision unapproachable by any other means.

—Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond)

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

—Miller, Henry Valentine

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, council, governments, Myself not least, but honoured of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windyTroy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

—Tennyson

He took her up in his arms in the way of a bachelor who has had amateur experience of the carrying of nieces.

—Ridge,W(illiam) Pett

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.

—Pagels, Heinz R(udolf)

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.

—Doyle, SirArthur Conan

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience† But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

—Huxley, Aldous Leonard

When a poet's mind isperfectlyequipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience†in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

   When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

—Austin, Mary Hunter

The act of living had been enjoyable; at some point when I was not paying attention, it had turned into a different sort of experience, to whose grimness I had grown so accustomed that I now took it for granted.

—Bowles, Paul Frederick

The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath fouled me.

—Tennyson

If there is a distinctive Irish experience, it is one of division, exacerbated by the fact that division in a country so small seems perverse.But the scale doesn't matter.

—Donoghue, Denis

With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.

—Mill,John Stuart

To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, issurely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always to some degree subject to affection.Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Experience and history teach†that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Heffer, Simon

The assaying of tea is an art and not a science. It is the man, and not his instruments, which is the most important.There can be no substitute for myexperience and intuited knowledge.

—Mo,Timothy

The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

—Miller, Henry Valentine

Ist es schwer und kann es ein AuÞenseiter begreifen,dass man eine Geschichte von ihrem Anfang in sich erlebt, vom fernen Punkt bis zu der heranfahrenden Lokomotive aus Stahl, Kohl und Dampf, sie aber auchjetzt noch nicht verl a« sst, sondern von ihr gejagt wird und aus eigenem Schwung vor ihr l a« uft, wohin sie nur st o« Þt und wohin man sie lockt. It is so difficult and can an outsider understand that you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, fromthe distant point up to theapproaching locomotive of steel, coal and steam, and you don't abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it.

—Kafka, Franz

It had never occurred to Giles that there was something perfectly sensible about wanting to hold onto innocence. He had alwaysgone in for the idea that since we only pass this way once, experience counts for everything.

—Wilson, A(ndrew) N(orman)

It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest† Experience does not show that individuals when they make up a social unit are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

—Keynes (of Tilton),John Maynard, 1st Baron

When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this†the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism.Curiously enough, the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. 416

—Housman, A(lfred) E(dward)

All experience is an arch to build on.

—Adams, Henry Brooks

Experience is always larger than language.

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

Das Ganze der Erfahrung gleicht einer Geheimschrift und die Philosophie der Entzifferung derselben. The whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it. «

—Schopenhauer, Arthur

Experience isnever limited, and it isnever 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 everyair-borne particle in its tissue.

—James, Henry

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

—Huxley, Aldous Leonard

Manhasthreeways ofacting wisely.First, onmeditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

—Confucius or K'ung Fu-tse,'The MasterK'ung'

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action.We cannot learn men from books.

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Experience isthename everyonegivestotheir mistakes.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position.On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of societyas one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth.On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

—Lewontin, Richard Charles

You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.

—Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

—Graves, Robert von Ranke

It is an axiom enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.

—Connolly,James

L'expe¤  rience†d'une femme e¤  crivain est comple'  tement schizophre¤  nique. Il faut toujours faire coupure entre les deux: d'une part, employer un langage qui n'est pas le no" t re†et la lutte qu'on me'  ne sur un autre plan, qui tend 'a casser tout  c° a, a'   essayer de faire a'   travers et dans le langage autre chose. The experience†of the woman writer is completely schizophrenic.One is always torn between two approaches: on the one hand, to use a language that is not ours†and on the other, the battle one fights to break all this up, in order to do something else through and in language.

—Wittig, Monique

Experience shows that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish. Together, we are doingourbesttore-establishpeaceand civil order inthe Gulf region, and to help those members of civil and ethnic minorities who continuetosuffer through no fault oftheirown.If wesucceed,ourmilitarysuccesswill have achieved its true objective.

—Elizabeth II

It isrequisite from time to time to remind one generation of the experience which led a former generation to important legislative actions.

—Jevons,William Stanley

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

—Golding, Sir William (Gerald)

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

—James, Alice

Holidays are the greatest learning experience unknown to man.

—Ogden, Frank also known as  'DrTomorrow'

We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

—Rich, Adrienne Cecile

Ay, ay, I have experience: I have a wife, and so forth.

—Congreve,William

Now mancannot live without somevisionof himself.But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

Cashing in. That's what we all do. It's called experience.

—Nofziger, Lyn (Franklin)

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.

—Bacon, Roger known as Doctor Mirabilis

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion are essential materials?

—Carlyle,Thomas

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and setsustothetaskswhich Hehastofulfil forour time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple,He will reveal Himself inthetoils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.

—Schweitzer, Albert

It isnot oftenthat nationslearnfromthepastöevenrarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences ofcertain actions, but theycannot forcea recognition of comparable situations.

—Kissinger, HenryAlfred

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

England's foreign policy should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom one lays the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.

—Gladstone,W(illiam) E(wart)

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimessad experience, that you cannot cometoany conclusion at all.

—Sackville-West,Vita (Victoria Mary)

On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of everyday experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. The problem was to make unfamiliar things credible.

—Constantinus

There is no boundary line to art. Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

—Parker, Charlie known as  'Bird'

No matter how vital experiencemight be whileyou lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

—Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson

Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. Huddled in dirt, the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

—Rochester,JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.

—Milton,John

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busyand boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

—Locke,John

'I've never been spoken to like this before in all my thirty years'experience,'she wails.'You have not had thirty years'experience,Mrs Grindle-Jones,' he says witheringly. 'You have had one year's experience 30 times.'

—Carr,J(ames) L(loyd)

an optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.

—Marquis, Don(ald Robert Perry)

History is philosophy teaching by experience.

—Carlyle,Thomas

   Some by experience find those words mis-placed: At leisure married, they repent in haste.

—Congreve,William

I was born†with ready-made parents and a sister and brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family wasborn, each,ina sensewithmemories onloan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-land, each Is-land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

—Frame,Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

—James,William

: When you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

—Albee, Edward Franklin, III

It must be possible for an empirical system to be refuted by experience.

—Popper, Sir Karl Raimund

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an'objective correlative'†such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

The oldölike childrenötalk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the onlyears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

—O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone

The triumph of hope over experience.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

There's almost as many different sorts of marriage as there's different sorts of people. There's the young things that marry for love, not knowing what they're doing, and the old things that marry for moneyand comfort and companionship. There's the people that marry for children. There's the people that don't intend to have children and that aren't fit to have them. There's the peoplethat marry becausethey're so much run after by the other sex that they have to put a stop to it somehow. There's the people that want to trya new experience, and the people that want to have done with experiences.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Mother of three; divorcee; American. Twenty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumour would have it.Wants steadyemployment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway). References upon request.

—Davis, Bette originally Ruth Elizabeth Davis

   I have very little experience of self-government. In fact, I am one of the most governed people in the world.

—Edinburgh, Prince Philip, Duke of

What makeswarinteresting forAmericansisthat wedon't fight waronoursoil,we don't have directexperience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give it.

—Dallek, Robert

Vous savez qu'on doit se sentir heureux.Tous les vrais e¤  crivains ont e¤  prouve¤   ce sentiment. Quand on ne l'e¤  prouve pas, je suis oblige¤   de vous en avertir, c'est mauvais signe. You know that one should feel happy. All thetrue writers have experienced this feeling.When one does not experience it, I am obliged to tell you that it is a bad sign.

—Sarraute, Nathalie

We are volcanoes.When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

—Le Guin, Ursula ne¤  e Kroeber

   Cambodiawasnot a mistake; it was a crime.The world is diminished by the experience.

—Shawcross,William

Technik†Kniff, dieWelt so einzurichten, dass wir sie nicht erleben mu«  ssen. Technology†the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

—Frisch, Max Rudolph

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

—Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions.

—Amin (Dada), Idi