Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” —

a man only knows what he's experienced

You can't create experience, you undergo it.

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.

People are changed not by exhortations to do things but by experiences... they may be changed by experience, in a way that could never be achieved with mere good advice.

The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.” — ALDOUS HUXLEY

it is not exact or relevant to say “I experience” or “I think.” “It” experiences or is experienced, “it” thinks or is thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves.

man’s reactions depend upon his previous habits and experiences of thought and action.

Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one’s own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.