A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. James Joyce
We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men. We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with sunshine – with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy. Robert G Ingersoll
Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced. John Keats
And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned. Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems
I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just ... in between. Jim Morrison
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, The Blank Book
Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world. Samuel Butler
All life is an experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don’t notice it. Charles Tart
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
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
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very experience of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. George Orwell, 1984
I’m not a genius; I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience. R Buckminster Fuller