What you experience is the result of the choices you’ve made. And all the moments you’ve experienced have shaped you to be the unique individual that you are today. Check out these 167 inspirational experience quotes.
Experience Quotes
1. All experience is an arch to build upon. – Henry Brook Adams
2. Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past. – Wendell Phillips
3. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. – Rita Mae Brown
4. Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes. – James Anthony Froude
5. The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. – Eleanor Roosevelt
6. 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. – Randy Pausch
7. The reward of suffering is experience. – Harry S. Truman
8. Experience is the best teacher. – Latin Proverb
9. Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. – Auguste Rodin
10. Experience is the thorn-lined road to success. – Terri Guillemets
11. Our ability to achieve success depends on the strength of our wings gained through knowledge and experience. The greater our knowledge and experience, the higher we can fly. – Catherine Pulsifer
12. If you are candid, you will discover that each experience in your life was absolutely necessary in order to have gotten you to the next place, and the next, up until this very moment. – Wayne Dyer
13. View life as a continuous learning experience. – Denis Waitley
14. Our time here on Earth is a learning experience and no one is exempt! – Angela Agranoff
15. Success is simply beeing on your path. Only through experience can we expand beyond our limited bee perspective and start to see the larger picture of things. – John Penberthy
16. I guess the more I have done, the less fearful I have become, because experience has taught me that the worst case is rarely likely to occur. – Tony Clark
17. Experience is not something you’re born with, and it’s not something you can buy. Experience is something you earn. – Fred Juliusson
18. Experience is a grindstone; and it is lucky for us, if we can get brightened by it, and not ground. – Josh Billings
19. And when something is best understood through experience, it’s best taught through stories. Stories bring you into an experience. – Kyle Idleman
20. Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. – Edgar Allan Poe
21. Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. – George Bernard Shaw
22. Each new experience is a risk. – Fran Watson
23. How we see and hold the full range of our experiences in our minds and in our hearts makes an enormous difference in the quality of this journey we are on, and what it means to us. – Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn
24. Experience is not what happens to a man: it is what a man does with what happens to him. – Aldous Huxley
25. Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only. – Samuel Smiles
26. Life is a series of experience, each of which makes us bigger even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward. – Henry Ford
27. Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can’t retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time. – Bernard Baruch
28. There is nothing more satisfying than living an experience that you worked hard to create. – Michelle C. Ustaszeski
29. You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. – Albert Camus
30. With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice. – Oprah Winfrey
31. Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment. – Eckhart Tolle
32. Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience. – Victoria Holt
33. A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out. – Lemony Snicket
34. Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing. – Oscar Wilde
35. You need to screw up to learn. You need to experience to create greatness. – Laurie Faria Stolar
36. Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time. – Nicholas Sparks
37. In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. – Ansel Adams
38. The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time. – Ben Okri
39. A baby has brains, but it doesn’t know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get. – L. Frank Baum
40. Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space…All that negative stuff. All the pain…It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it…up and away… – Melvin Burgess
41. Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you–it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
42. Many times what we perceive as an error or failure is actually a gift. And eventually we find that lessons learned from that discouraging experience prove to be of great worth. – Richelle E. Goodrich
43. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that. – Benjamin Franklin
44. The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence. – Lyman Bryson
45. Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. – Paulo Coelho
46. Experience is more important than knowledge. – Santosh Kalwar
47. Experience is what you get when you didn’t know what you wanted. – Jill Shalvis
48. Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. – C.S. Lewis
49. The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating. – Eric Micha’el Leventhal
50. …talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything. – Patrick Süskind
51. Every adversity brings new experiences and new lessons. – Lailah Gifty Akita
52. An optimist is a man who has never had much experience. – Don Marquis
53. But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. – Immanuel Kant
54. Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic. – T.F. Hodge
55. Experience is never at bargain price. – Alice B. Toklas
56. Give your all to every experience, feel it breathe it appreciate it, nothing lasts forever, when it’s gone you’ll remember the feeling it once gave you and sometimes that’s enough. – Nikki Rowe
57. I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know–or perhaps you don’t know, but it’s all the same. – H.P. Lovecraft
58. YOU are the creator of your experience, therefore: all problems must be met within YOU. – Vivian Amis
59. …ordinary experience has to be made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection. – Shoshana Zuboff
60. Experience will tell you if you need more of it. – Jack Gardner
61. Experience prefers humility. – Toba Beta
62. Take no one’s word for anything, including mine – but trust your experience. – James Baldwin
63. It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life. – Abhijit Naskar
64. Life experience is work experience. – Richie Norton
65. With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight. – Chris Bohjalian
66. Books deliver information so that experience has a chance to exercise creativity. – Richard Diaz
67. You cannot experience something if you don’t have the necessary sensitivity, and you cannot develop your sensitivity except by undergoing a long string of experiences. – Yuval Noah Harari
68. It is possible to change your entire life experience simply by altering the way you view life itself. – Steven Redhead
69. The more you experience, the more you are able to understand. – Matt Fox
70. Experience is the pain that brings pleasure. – Roger Ferrer
71. Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. – Vernon Law
72. The experience you fear the most
teaches you the most.
– Yarro Rai
73. There is nothing called failure, everything is experience. – Sukant Ratnakar
74. Experience has been the only teacher of any consequence I have ever had. – Jose R. Coronado
75. Life is a much better experience without the minds definitions, assumptions and interpretations. – Steve Leasock
76. There is no issue or experience that does not have a valid place in our unique story. – Jack Angelo
77. We sacrifice our youth in order to gain needed experience. When we gain experience, we continue to grind just as hard as we did during our apprenticeships. – Kilroy J. Oldster
78. Within every good experience is the promise for more; within every bad experience is the promise for better times. – Foster Kinn
79. Experience is what we do with what we learn. The one who has experience uses intelligence to change his life with what he has learned. – Alan Maiccon
80. We can teach from our experience, but we cannot teach experience. – Sasha Azevedo
81. One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning. – James Russell Lowell
82. Experience is like medicine; some persons require larger doses of it than others, and do not like to take it pure, but a little disguised and better adapted to the taste. – Lord Acton
83. Experience is a safe guide. – William Penn
84. The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate. – Doug Larson
85. That’s the way people go. They have a powerful experience and they use it to interpret, rightly or wrongly, what happens later in the rest of the world. – James Fenton
86. No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience. – John Locke
87. We learn of great things by little experiences. – Bram Stoker
88. To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity, it is essential to feel it. Some occasions come to all men; but to many they are of little use, and to some they are none. – Walter Bagehot
89. The field of experience is the whole universe in all directions. Theory remains shut up within the limits of human faculties. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
90. What’s essential is that we learn what an experience is like by having it, we gain abilities to remember, imagine and recognize. – David Lewis
91. What we write is fiction; what we experience, truth. – Marty Rubin
92. The world of immediate experience-the world in which we find ourselves living-must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is. – Herbert Marcuse
93. It’s not what you experience, it’s how you experience it. – Akiroq Brost
94. I have made mistakes, more than anyone else can but I am fearless, bold and more wise than I could have been. Life is an experience not a mistake. – Pushpa Rana
95. Experiences expand understanding and when understanding expands you naturally experience more. – Drishti Bablani
96. Most people learn nothing from experience except confirmation of their own prejudices. – Bertrand Russell
97. Wisdom does not always come with age. It comes from Experience. – Kailin Gow
98. Experience is not the best teacher. The consequence from experience is the best teacher. No consequence no lesson. – Ford Taylor
99. Every experience you have in this lifetime was meant for you to grow into the person you were meant to become. – Suzy Kassem
100. People can talk about their personal experience and it can be true for them and for their life whatever they learned from that; because what they tell to themselves will always be true for themselves. But they can always change the way they think and talk to themselves and realize that the experience they have been having is not a universal law. – E. Christian Trejo
101. Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. – John Keats
102. Every experience, good or bad, is a priceless collector’s item. – Isaac Marion
103. Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. – Karl Kraus
104. Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practised. – Barbara W. Tuchman
105. A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
106. The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely. – William Osler
107. Experience is a good school. But the fees are high. – Heinrich Heine
108. Go for it. No matter how it ends, it was an experience. – Anonymous
109. Every experience in your life is being orchestrated to teach you something you need to know to move forward. – Brian Tracy
110. The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us. – Gabrielle Bernstein
111. The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse. – Helen Keller
112. And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high. – Ayrton Senna
113. Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it. – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
114. When we shift our perception, our experience changes. – Lindsay Wagner
115. Every experience, good or bad, you have to learn from. – Patrick Mahomes
116. Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it’s about experience, it’s about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious. – Daniel Libeskind
117. The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. – Emily Dickinson
118. One of the greatest moments in anybody’s developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is. – Norman Vincent Peale
119. Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. – T. S. Eliot
120. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. – Mao Zedong
121. We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. – George Washington
122. It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed. – Ram Dass
123. Experience is like a comb that life gives you when you are bald. – Navjot Singh Sidhu
124. Good judgement comes from experience. Sometimes, experience comes from bad judgement. – Christian Slater
125. Experience – the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced. – Ambrose Bierce
126. To me the arcade experience is the ultimate gaming experience. – Eugene Jarvis
127. 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
128. The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice. – Frank McCourt
129. The best thing we can do with rejection is to make it a learning experience – rejection is a great teacher. – Adena Friedman
130. The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience. – Sterling K. Brown
131. A few years’ experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings. – George Mason
132. When we learn from experience, the scars of sin can lead us to restoration and a renewed intimacy with God. – Charles Stanley
133. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it. – Steven Wright
134. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. – R. D. Laing
135. God sends experience to paint men’s portraits. – Henry Ward Beecher
136. Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you. – Katherine Anne Porter
137. Experience is the only prophesy of wise men. – Alphonse de Lamartine
138. Experience is retrospect knowledge. – Hosea Ballou
139. Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses. – Sergei Lukyanenko
140. Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. – Henry James
141. Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments. – Leonardo da Vinci
142. Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience. – Roger Bacon
143. With experience comes improvement. – Wayne Gerard Trotman
144. Experience is making mistakes and learning from them. – Bill Ackman
145. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. – Walter Pater
146. Experience is what you get while looking for something else. – Federico Fellini
147. One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we’ve been wishing to lead ourselves. – Richard Bach
148. If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before. – Richard P. Feynman
149. You can never regret anything you do in life. You kind of have to learn the lesson from whatever the experience is and take it with you on your journey forward. – Aubrey O’Day
150. All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. – Alfred Lord Tennyson
151. When we recognise that countless others experience similar and painful hardships, the blow is softened. – Dee Waldeck
152. Waiting for an experience elicits more happiness than waiting for a material good… When we spend money on experiences, those purchases are also more associated with our identity, connection and social behavior. – Jacob Morgan
153. Things don’t provide us with joy; it is experiencing the thing that brings us joy. – Melissa Heisler
154. If knowledge is the ammunition of reform, experience is the wick to ignite it. – Mudit Handa
155. When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It’s only our experience of it that makes it new. – Lauren Willig
156. Your first experience could be the most wonderful thing or the most devastating. – Thabiso Monkoe
157. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. – Sigmund Freud
158. Experience is the catalyst for all great stories. – Richelle E. Goodrich
159. Nobody can experience everything, so you need to borrow the experience of others. – Amber Hurdle
160. The experiences you get from failures early in life, will carry you for the rest of your life. – Tarun Sharma
161. There’s no substitute for imagination, but creativity is only enhanced when forged with life experience. – John Ridley
162. The road may be rough, the journey may be tough and the experience may be bitter, but they are stepping stones to our future thrones. – Bamigboye Olurotimi
163. We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. – Lawrence M. Krauss
164. See your hard times through the spectacles of your experiences. They, too, shall pass away. – Ogwo David Emenike
165. What you envision for yourself is far more likely to become a lifelong passion than anything someone can drop into your lap. This is a reminder that pursuing my vision for my life is not a waste of time. Detours happen. They become experience. With experience, accomplishment is only a matter of time. – Lashawnda Jones
166. Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life. – Tony Robbins
167. Have no regrets in life because of the choices you make. Good or bad, they are a learning experience, to help you grow. The only regret in life, is to never make a choice at all. – James Hauenstein