Experience (n.) reads the invisible writing: the layman can understand a legal document, but only the experienced lawyer sees the border warfare of ingenuity against ingenuity in every phrase — and the layman could hardly copy it exactly.
Experience (n.) is a dissident compromise: a mistrust that, a little loving, still believes something, and a love that, a little mistrustful, keeps a suspicion or two.
Experience (n.) is learning to swim in the middle of the sea: a harness about your waist, but the pole that holds you up you cannot see.
Experience (n.) does not need world history: put the pupil of possibility on the Jutland heath, where the biggest event is a grouse taking off, and he will live everything more fully than history's applauded hero.
Experience (n.) is of all ludicrous things the most ludicrous: far from making a man wise, it makes him mad if he knows nothing higher.
Experience (n.) grows rarer as knowledge grows commoner: more and more people know very much, and experienced people become more and more rare.
Experience (n.) is a friend with a double tongue, and the conclusion drawn from it is a sling in which a man more often catches himself.
Experience (n.) teaches two children raised side by side opposite things: one learns humility from rebuke, the other learns to store up secret anger.
Experience (n.) is a good guide because it always has a yardstick, but whoever has only the yardstick of time goes down with time, and perhaps does not even last as long.
Experience (n.) that never learns its own insufficiency makes life a battle in the clouds the wind blows away, a writing in the sand the waves erase.