Quote of the Day (Edith Hamilton, on ‘Human Experience’)

“Though the outside of life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.”— American educator, classicist, and author Edith Hamilton (1867-1963), The Greek Way (1930)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Life and Experience)

“Man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), A Mixture of Frailties, Volume 3 of “The Salterton Trilogy” (1958

Quote of the Day (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., on Experience as ‘The Life of the Law’)

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”—Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), The Common Law (1881)

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, on Judging the Future by the ‘Lamp of Experience’)

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”—Virginia orator, governor, and revolutionary patriot Patrick Henry (1736-1799), speech to the Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775, in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, 9th ed., pp. 138–39 (1836, reprinted 1970).

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on Experience)

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.” —American historian (and descendant of two U.S. Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Words and Experiences)

“Words form the thread on which we hang our experiences.” —English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Collected Essays (1959)

Quote of the Day (Alfred Adler, on Our Relation to the Meanings of Situations)

“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”— Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), What Life Should Mean to You (1937)

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on Art and Experience)

“I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.” —Southern novelist / short-story writer

Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47” (interviewed by Linda Kuehl), The Paris Review, Fall 1972