Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

Because of my wrestling background, nothing a director can throw at me on a set can faze me.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

Whoever doesn’t know it must learn and find by experience that ‚a quiet conscience makes one strong!‘

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

Growing up I didn’t watch movies.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.