Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Experience

He hazardeth much who depends for his learning on experience. An unhappy master he that is only made wise by many shipwrecks; a miserable merchant that is neither rich nor wise till he has been bankrupt, by experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

Human experience, like the stern-lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarcely in that; for it is true we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. Remember this: they that will not be counselled cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason, she will rap your knuckles.

No definition, no suppositions of any sect, are of force enough to destroy constant experience.

Ah! the youngest heart has the same waves within it as the oldest, but without the plummet which can measure their depths.

All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience.

The knowledge drawn from experience is quite of another kind from that which flows from speculation or discourse.

It is a melancholy fact, verified by every day’s observation, that the experience of the past is totally lost both upon individuals and nations. A few persons, indeed, who have attended to the history of former errors, are aware of the consequences to which they invariably lead, and lament the progress of national violence in the same way as they do the career of individual intemperance. But upon the great mass of mankind—the young, the active, and the ambitious—such examples are wholly thrown away. Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience and stilled the voice of reason.

Several different men, who have all had equal, or even the very same, experience, that is, have been witnesses or agents in the same transactions, will often be found to resemble so many different men looking at the same book: one, perhaps, though he distinctly sees black marks on white paper, has never learned his letters; another can read, but is a stranger to the language in which the book is written; another has an acquaintance with the language, but understands it imperfectly; another is familiar with the language, but is a stranger to the subject of the book, and wants power or previous instruction to enable him to fully take in the author’s drift; while another, again, perfectly comprehends the whole.

The object that strikes the eye is to all of these persons the same; the difference of the impressions produced on the mind of each is referable to the differences in their minds.

Experience, in its strict sense, applies to what has occurred within a person’s own knowledge.

There is a mixed kind of evidence relating both to the senses and understanding, depending upon our own observation and repeated trials of the issues and events of actions or things, called experience.