Experience, Education and Knowledge

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
-- Douglas Adams

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, Last Chance to See (1990)

There is no such thing as a self-made man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.
-- George Matthew Adams

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
-- Henry Brook Adams

The wisest of the wise may err.
-- Aeschylus

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.
[Knowledge is power.]
-- Sir Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacræ: De Hæresibus (1597)

No matter where you go, there you are.
-- Buckaroo Banzai

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
-- Alexander Graham Bell

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
-- Alexander Graham Bell

They [politicians] are not just clueless, they are dynamically anticlueful.
-- John Perry Barlow

Groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having.
-- John Perry Barlow

We made too many wrong mistakes.
-- Yogi Berra

Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; don't walk behind me, I may not lead; walk beside me, and just be my friend.
--Albert Camus

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.
--Albert Camus

I am always willing to learn. I do not, however, always enjoy being taught.
--Winston Churchill

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
--Winston Churchill

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
--Winston Churchill

"Give us the tools and we will finish the job."
--Winston Churchill

"No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism."
--Winston Churchill

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
--Winston Churchill

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time
--Winston Churchill

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
--Winston Churchill

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
--Winston Churchill

I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
--Clarence Darrow

To think is to differ.
--Clarence Darrow

Some people like my advice so much that they frame it up on the wall instead of using it.
-- Gordon R. Dickson

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
-- Thomas A. Edison

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. If one asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
-- Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-- Albert Einstein

If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants.
-- Albert Einstein

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
-- Albert Einstein

The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
-- Albert Einstein

The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
-- Albert Einstein

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
-- Albert Einstein

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty .
-- Albert Einstein

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein

The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?
-- Albert Einstein

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
-- Albert Einstein

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-- Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
-- Albert Einstein

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-- Albert Einstein

The only real valuable thing is intuition.
-- Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-- Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science
-- Albert Einstein

The only source of knowledge is experience.
-- Albert Einstein

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
-- Albert Einstein

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
-- Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
-- Albert Einstein

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
-- Albert Einstein

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
-- Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
-- Albert Einstein

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
-- T. S. Eliot

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?' because you will get `down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
-- Richard Feynman

Experience is a dear teacher, and only fools will learn from no other.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Energy and persistence conquer all thing.
-- Benjamin Franklin

To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.
--Benjamin Franklin

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
--Benjamin Franklin

Never confuse motion with action.
--Ben Franklin

No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
-- Heraklit

...[it] is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
-- Frank Herbert

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
-- Eric Hoffer

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

As life is action and passion, it is required of man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
-- Aldous Huxley

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
-- Aldous Huxley

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
-- Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
-- Aldous Huxley

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
-- Aldous Huxley

This is an important statement and was given prominence in the opening of the book In Pursuit of Reason.
--Thomas Jefferson

It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.
-- Thomas Jefferson

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
--Thomas Jefferson

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
--Thomas Jefferson

Honesty is the 1st chapter in the book of wisdom.
--Thomas Jefferson

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin

Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.
[Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.]
-- Antonio Machado

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
-- H. L. Mencken

The happiest man was the one who came nearest to killing the obvious human desires, hopes and aspirations; the soaring, starving poet.
-- H. L. Mencken

The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
- John Stuart Mill

In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself...the fallacy of what was fallacious.
-- John Stuart Mill

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
- Montaigne

What do I know?
-- Montaigne

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend.
-- Montaigne

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.
-- Patrick Overton, Faith

The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.
-- Blaise Pascal

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
-- Thomas Paine

Chance favors only the prepared mind.
-- Louis Pasteur

Learn from the errors of others. You won't live long enough to commit them all.
-- Hyman G. Rickover

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
-- Tom Robbins

You must do the things you think you cannot do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
-- Bertrand Russell

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre

I always knew that looking back at my tears would make me laugh, but I never thought that looking back at my laughter would make me cry.
-- Cat Stevens

Without knowing why I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
-- Leo Tolstoy

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Love truth, but pardon error.
-- Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-- Voltaire

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
-- Voltaire

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.
-- Voltaire

Without philosophy we should be little above animals.
-- Voltaire

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: It might have been!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
-- Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-- Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde

Do or do not. There is no try.
-- Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)