All experience is an arch to build on.

-Adams, Henry Brooks
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.6.

: 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
JERRY1958  On pornographic playing cards. The Zoo Story.

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
  Unsolicited advice to Lord Snowdon on the ending of his marriage to Princess Margaret, quoted in  A Barrow International Gossip (1983).

   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 Land of Little Rain,'The Basket Maker'.

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
  Opus Majus (translated by Robert Belle Burke,1928).

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

-Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)
Zuleika Dobson, ch.7.

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
  Without Stopping:  An  Autobiography, ch.17.

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
  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'History'.

History is philosophy teaching by experience.

-Carlyle,Thomas
  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'History'.

'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)
  The Harpole Report, ch.21.

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
Table Talk (published1835), entry for18 Dec.

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'
c.479  BC  The Analects.

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

-Congreve,William
  Setter to Sharper. The Old Bachelor, act 5, sc.1.

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

-Congreve,William
  Fainall to Mirabell. The Way of the World, act1, sc.3.

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

-Connolly,James
  Socialism Made Easy.

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
  Within the Tides, preface.

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
  In the NewYork Times, 24 Feb.

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
  Advertisement placed in the Hollywood trade papers.

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
^7  Vivian Grey, bk.5, ch.1.

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
  We Irish.