"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn."
— C.S. Lewis

"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

"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)

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
— Aldous Huxley

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
— Charlie Parker

""I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.""
— Martha Graham

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."
— Meister Eckhart

"I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. Anything else is just...in between."
— Jim Morrison

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

"Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced."
— John Keats

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"Life, like classical music, is full of difficult passages that are conquered as much through endurance and determination as through any particular skill."
— Sheri L. Dew

"Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius."
— William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Facsimile in Full Color)

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

"All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life. Then, even the holiest of words are only words."
— Deng Ming- Dao

"We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."
— Oscar Wilde

"You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."
— Albert Camus

"A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by readin’. The few who learn by observation.
The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."
— Will Rogers

"God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

"The difference between knowledge and skill is practice."
— Holly Marie Simmers

"The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures."
— Sara Paretsky (Bleeding Kansas)

"Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?

or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again. "
— Elizabeth Peters

"Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

"He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled."
— Tim O'Brien (Northern Lights)

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness."
— Eckhart Tolle

"Readers voted me BEST AUTHOR of Pasadena in the annual Best of Issue in the Pasadena Weekly!!"
— Andre Coleman