Quotes about Experience

In short, I should have liked to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet be man enough to know its value

Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure.

I remember him as something left behind upon the road of life—as something I have passed, rather than have actually been—and almost think of him as of someone else.

He is of what is called the old school - a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young.

Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible.

I have an affection for the road ... formed in the impressibility of untried youth and hope.

Everything in our lives, whether of good or evil, affects us most by contrast

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never have had it?

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour.

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands!

It is the same with all these new countries and wonderful sights. They are very beautiful, and they astonish me, but I am not collected enough—not familiar enough with myself, if you can quite understand what I mean—to have all the pleasure in them that I might have. What I knew before them, blends with them, too, so curiously.

it always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life, when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity—two of the best qualities that Heaven gives them—and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.