I had a C-section, and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice, and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

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

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

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

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

My mother raised me with God. We were poor financially, but we were rich spiritually.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

I always say I’m one of the toughest mama’s boys you’re ever gonna meet. And I say that to send a message to all the young thugs out there; that it’s nothing to be ashamed of to say you love your mother.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

Only the really plain people know about love – the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they soon exhaust their talents.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

There have been so many great players that I’ve played with, that I’ve played against over the years.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

My momma didn’t clean up floors so I could be a thug… so I could wear my pants down.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

There’s one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and – I’m going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself – I think most respect me.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

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

It’s not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country… and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President… like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don’t have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.

Actually, I didn’t start sweating until I had children.

I did 20 years in the Navy. I joined the Navy right out of high school and went through Navy boot camp, went to SEAL training, got done with that, and then showed up at a SEAL team, where I did 20 years. That was pretty much my whole adult life.

For an Ethiopian mother, if you have a chubby kid, it means you’re doing something good.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto – I tell people you don’t have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.