Quotes to inspire and reflect

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.

No man alive can say, This shall not happen to me.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?—to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

Nothing has happened to you unless you make much of it.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

The burnt child, urged by rankling ire, / Can hardly wait to get back at the fire.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

Experience, travel— / These are an education in themselves.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

In the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.

a certain / alloy of expediency improves the / gold of morality and makes / it wear all tbe longer.

Policy sits above conscience.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of s aints.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

Oft expectation fails and most oft there / Where most it promises, and oft it hits / Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

Even if it is to be, what end do you serve by running to meet distress?

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

Lighten grief with hopes of a brighter morrow; / Temper joy, in fear of a change of fortune.

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.

Being is the great explainer.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

Every life is its own excuse for being.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery: our life.

As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

Some men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it.

Its just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.

People’s sympathies seem generally to be with the fire so long as no one is in danger of being burned.

Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.

The best of things, beyond their measure, cloy.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

The heart of man does not tolerqte an absence of the excellent and supreme.

We need someone, I say, on whom our character may mould itself: you’ll never make the crooked straight without a ruler.

Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one’s knowledge or one’s taste.