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

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.

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.

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.

Experienced professionals? They have dragged out their life in stupor and semi-sleep, they have married hastily, out of impatience, they have made children at random. They have met other men in cafés, at weddings and funerals. Sometimes, caught in the tide, they have struggled against it without understanding what was happening to them. All that has happened around them has eluded them; long, obscure shapes, events from afar, brushed by them rapidly and when they turned to look all had vanished. And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels.

You are the way you are because of what you’ve experienced.

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.

You have learned the lesson by experience.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

"They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience — and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?"

"What kind of experience?”

“Well — places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”

“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak — but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier — and that’s a fact.”

“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”

“Much, much sillier.”

“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”

“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to — if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it — then it can be kind of marvelous."

...you can only value something if you've experienced it.

Education is experience and experience is self-reliance.

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.

our experience is what we attend to