In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.

Men, even when alone, lighten their labors by song, however rude it may be.

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin. the opportunity is lost.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.

Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.

Our minds are like our stomaches; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetite.

Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.

The pretended admission of a fault on our part creates an excellent impression.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

That which prematurely arrives at perfection soon perishes.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.

We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

Everything that has a beginning comes to an end.

A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.

While we are examining into everything we sometimes find truth where we least expected it.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.

Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.

For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.

Where evil habits are once settled, they are more easily broken than mended.

The gifts of nature are infinite in their variety, and mind differs from mind almost as much as body from body.

He who speaks evil only differs from his who does evil in that he lacks opportunity.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.