The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to to believe that experience is a substitute for intelligence.

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Even rats learn from experience.

The expert is a person who avoids the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.

There are three kinds of people: The few who learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The majority of them who have to touch the electric fence to see if it's really on.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along.

We really don’t learn anything from our experience. We only learn from reflecting on our experience.

One of the interesting things about getting older (or experienced as I like to call it) is that you can detect a problem before you know why. Have you been in a situation where someone says “Let’s do it this way” and you get an immediate little stomach ache because you know damned well that it won’t work? And then someone asks why you think it’s a bad plan and you really can’t explain it. All you know is that the last ten plans that sounded kind of like this plan all fell apart.

Experience Without Reflection Is Worthless

Experience can expand your wisdom, understanding, maturity, resilience, credibility, and confidence as well as your knowledge base, expertise, proficiency and skill. But only if you learn from it, reflecting on what happened, what resulted, and what can be learned.... A donkey may have participated in ten military campaigns but when all is said and done it is still a donkey.

Experience Is Unfair

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.