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).

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

-Emerson, RalphWaldo
  Society and Solitude,'Courage'.

God knows that the lesson we learn from life is that our very existence in the nature of things is a perpetual harming of somebody elseöif only because every mouthful of food that we eat is a mouthful taken from somebody else.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
Ancient Lights, dedication.

   The Internet has taken shape with startlingly little planning† The most universal and indispensable network on the planet somehow burgeoned without so muchasa boardofdirectors, never minda mergers-and- acquisitions department. There is a paradoxical lesson here for strategists. In economic terms, the great corporations are acting like socialist planners, while old- fashioned free-market capitalism blossoms at their feet.

-Gleick,James
  In the NewYork Times Magazine,1 May.

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

-Miller, Henry Valentine
The Books in My Life, preface.

However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.

-Mumford, Lewis
  Technics and Civilization.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

-Nabokov,Vladimir
  Interview in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Spring.

We said to the Chinese,'You have behaved very ill; we have had to teach you better manners; it has cost us something to do it, but we will send our bill in, and you must pay our charges.' That was done, and they have certainly profited by the lesson. They have become free traders too.

-Palmerston, HenryJohnTemple, 3rd Viscount
  On the OpiumWars of1839^42. Election speech at Tiverton, Devon.

To be thoroughly conversant with a Man'sheart istotake our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.

-Poe, EdgarAllan
  'Marginalia', in the Southern Literary Messenger, Jun.

Teach him how to live, And, oh! still harder lesson! how to die.

-Porteus, Beilby
  'Death'.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. Theyall require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

-Marquis of
  Letter to Lord Lytton,15 Jun. Quoted in Lady Gwendolen Cecil Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921^32), vol.2, ch.4.