Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Experience
Suffering brings experience.
Æschylus—Agamemnon. 185.
Behold, we live through all things,—famine, thirst,
Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery,
All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst
On soul and body,—but we cannot die,
Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn,—
Lo, all things can be borne!
Elizabeth Akers Allen—Endurance.
By experience we find out a shorter way by a long wandering. Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.
Roger Ascham—Schoolmaster.
It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience.
Roger Ascham—Schoolmaster.
Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried?
Byron—The Corsair. Canto I. St. 1.
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Coleridge—The Ancient Mariner. Pt. VII. Last St.
To show the world what long experience gains,
Requires not courage, though it calls for pains;
But at life’s outset to inform mankind
Is a bold effort of a valiant mind.
Crabbe—Borough. Letter VII. L. 47.
In her experience all her friends relied,
Heaven was her help and nature was her guide.
Crabbe—Parish Register. Pt. III.
Tu proverai si come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle
Lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.
Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of other’s bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another’s stairs.
Dante—Paradiso. XVII. 58.
Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
Emerson—Oration. The American Scholar.
Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.
Froude—Short Studies on Great Subjects. Education.
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
Froude—Short Studies on Great Subjects. Party Politics.
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
Froude—Short Studies on Great Subjects. Society in Italy in the Last Days of the Roman Republic.
Experience join’d with common sense,
To mortals is a providence.
Matthew Green—The Spleen. L. 312.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
Patrick Henry—Speech at Virginia Convention. March 23, 1775.
Stultorum eventus magister est.
Experience is the teacher of fools.
Livy—Annales. XXII. 39.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
Lowell—Among my Books. Shakespeare Once More.
Semper enim ex aliis alia proseminat usus.
Experience is always sowing the seed of one thing after another.
Manilius—Astronomica. I. 90.
Experience, next, to thee I owe,
Best guide; not following thee, I had remain’d
In ignorance; thou open’st wisdom’s way,
And giv’st access, though secret she retire.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. IX. L. 807.
What man would be wise, let him drink of the river
That bears on his bosom the record of time;
A message to him every wave can deliver
To teach him to creep till he knows how to climb.
John Boyle O’Reilly—Rides of the Road.
Who heeds not experience, trust him not.
John Boyle O’Reilly—Rules of the Road.
Nam in omnibus fere minus valent præcepta quam experimenta.
In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.
Quintilian—De Institutione Oratorio. II. 5. 5.
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart.
Hamlet. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 45.
I know
The past and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly;
For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven.
Shelley—Queen Mob. III. L. 6.
Experientia docet.
Experience teaches.
Founded on
Tacitus—Annales. Bk. V. 6.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravl’d world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
Tennyson—Ulysses. (Free rendering of Dante’s Inferno. Canto XVI.)
And others’ follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches,
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.
Tennyson—Will Waterproof; Lyrical Monologue.
Experto credite.
Believe one who has tried it.
Vergil—Æneid. XI. 283.
Experto crede Roberto.
Believe Robert who has tried it.
A proverb quoted by Burton—Introduction to Anatomy of Melancholy. Common in the middle ages. Experto crede Ruberto is given as a saying in a discourse of Ulricus Meliter to Sigismond, Archduke of Austria. (1489). Same in Coronis—Apolog. pro Erasmus Coll. First version is in an epitaph in an old chapel of Exeter College. (1627). Le Roux de Lincy traces it to Gomès de Trier—Jardin de Recreation. (1611).
Learn the lesson of your own pain—learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul—in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.
Mrs. Humphry Ward—Robert Elsmere. Ch. XXVII.
Da dacht ich oft: schwatzt noch so hoch gelehrt,
Man weiss doch nichts, als was man selbst erfährt.
I have often thought that however learned you may talk about it, one knows nothing but what he learns from his own experience.
Wieland—Oberon. II. 24.