But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.
experiencequotes
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.
It is of great consequence to have previously determined the concept that one wants to elucidate through observation before questioning experience about it; for one finds in experience what one needs only if one knows in advance what to look for.
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
dive / experience / rise / truth
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
[T]he vanity of the contents” of individual experience is scrutable as an inessential trapping drawn into a matter by vested interests “…since it is at the same time the vanity of the self that knows itself to be vain.
experience / interest / vanity
What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
experience / history / people
For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world. I spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me.