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

Experience life in all possible ways — good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become.

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.

"By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

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.

We can refer to this one process as experience-knowledge (the hyphen indicating that these are two inseparable aspects of one whole movement).

Wisdom is the daughter of experience

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.

Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.

In the progress of politics, as in the common occurrences of life, we are not only apt to forget the ground we have travelled over, but frequently neglect to gather up experience as we go. We expend, if I may so say, the knowledge of every day on the circumstances that produce it, and journey on in search of new matter and new refinements: but as it is pleasant and sometimes useful to look back, even to the first periods of infancy, and trace the turns and windings through which we have passed, so we may likewise derive many advantages by halting a while in our political career, and taking a review of the wondrous complicated labyrinth of little more than yesterday.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

It is, however, the better part of wisdom to regard the mistake as experience which will help guide you in the future, a part, though a painful part, of your education.