Famous Quotes

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred."

Walter Benjamin on Experience

More quotes about Experience

• "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."

  Soren Kierkegaard on Experience

• "The only source of knowledge is experience."

  Albert Einstein on Experience

• "Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

  C. S. Lewis on Experience

• "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

  Oscar Wilde on Experience

• "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

  Mark Twain on Experience

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

• "The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion."

• "The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."

• "It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed."

• "The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing."

• "Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death."