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.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

I don’t care about age. Nor do I care about those who do not accept the science. I don’t have as much experience, and therefore I listen more. But I also have the right to express my opinion, no matter my age.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I’ve had a lot of experience with that.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

The reward of suffering is experience.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

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.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

The left paw has done me well over the years. I’m not a scientist, I’m a martial artist.

The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Ethics and power are separate.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

There is moderation even in excess.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

As a human being, anger is a part of our mind. Irritation also part of our mind. But you can do – anger come, go. Never keep in your sort of – your inner world, then create a lot of suspicion, a lot of distrust, a lot of negative things, more worry.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.

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

I’m not going to fight because I mean too much to our team, and I can’t afford to be suspended for a game or do something stupid to get me kicked out of a playoff game.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.