Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science.
What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.
Illusions fall away, like the peels of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience.
No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
Experience is the teacher of all things.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
Experience teaches.
Only the thinking man lives his life, the thoughtless man's life passes him by.
I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
Two things teach man about his whole nature: instinct and experience.
The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time.
The dream is stronger than experience.
Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life.
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the ‚conquest‘ of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
Experience by itself is not science.
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen conventions.
Of the experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but a good scholar.
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
The supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world-picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or 'feeling one's way in'] is developed by experience.
Truth is what stands the test of experience.
It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
