1. A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts. ~Colette
2. A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew. ~Herb Caen
3. A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. ~Mark Twain
4. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
5. All that I know I learned after I was thirty. ~Georges Clemenceau
6. Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. ~Pete Seeger
7. Every moment is an experience. ~Jake Roberts
8. Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again. ~Andre Gide
9. Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude. ~Ralph Marston
10. Experience is a comb which nature gives us when we are bald. ~Proverb
11. Experience is a good school but the fees are high. ~Heinrich Heine
12. Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it. ~Jimmy Connors
13. Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him. ~Aldous Leonard Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932
14. Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. ~Oscar Wilde
15. Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action. ~Benjamin Disraeli
16. Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes. ~Oscar Wilde
17. Experience is the teacher of all things. ~Julius Caesar
18. Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones. ~Unknown
19. Experience is what you got by not having it when you need it. ~Unknown
20. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other. ~Benjamin Franklin
21. Experience makes more timid men than it does wise ones. ~Josh Billings
22. Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust. ~Karl Kraus
23. Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience. ~Randolph Bourne
24. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. ~Chinese Proverb
25. God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars. ~Elbert Hubbard
26. Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment. ~Rita Mae Brown
27. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. ~Douglas Adams
28. I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college. ~Hubert Humphrey
29. Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. ~David T. Wolf
30. If experience was so important, we'd never have had anyone walk on the moon. ~Doug Rader
31. If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires. ~Abigail Van Buren
32. If you want to understand democracy, spend less time in the library with Plato, and more time in the buses with people. ~Simeon Strunsky
33. In youth we learn; in age we understand. ~Marie Ebner-Eschenbach
34. Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience. ~Clarence Day, The Crow's Nest
35. Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself. ~Alfred Sheinwold
36. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. ~Soren Kierkegaard
37. Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along. ~Samuel Butler
38. Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. ~John Gardner
39. Life, not the parson, teaches conduct. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
40. Looking back, you realize that everything would have explained itself if you had only stopped interrupting. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
41. Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl. ~Stephen Leacock
42. No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients. ~Hindu Proverb
43. Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. ~Auguste Rodin
44. The experience I gained at age 21 would be useful if I were ever 21 again. But I'm 71 and new at it and keep making age 71 mistakes. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
45. The only source of knowledge is experience. ~Albert Einstein
46. The problem is that when you get it, you're too damned old to do anything about it. ~Jimmy Connors
47. The trouble with experience is that it usually teaches you something you really didn't want to know. ~Unknown
48. The trouble with using experience as a guide is that the final exam often comes first and then the lesson. ~Unknown
49. The world is your school. ~Martin H. Fischer
50. The years teach much which the days never know. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
51. There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply. ~Josh Billings
52. There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience. ~Laurence J. Peter
53. We have two lives - the one we learn with and the life we live after that. ~Bernard Malamud
54. We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us. ~Charles Louis de Secondat
55. We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. ~Mark Twain
56. What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print. ~Isadora Duncan
57. Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail. ~Mark van Doren
58. You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. ~John Updike