Each Learns Anew
Each generation has to find out for itself that the stove is hot.
The Fine Print
The difference between education and experience: Education is what you get from reading the small print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.
Experience Only Once
If at first you don’t succeed, so much for skydiving.
The Real Meaning of Skill
The essence of skill is extracting meaning from everyday experience.
The Limits of Our Own Experience
We ought not permit the term experience to be confined within the brackets of one’s own existence. The meaning of experience is a poor and haggard thing if it only refers to what has happened to me. The meaning of education and of culture is that we live vicariously a thousand other lives, and all that has happened to human beings, things that have been recorded not by my experience but by the experience of others, become a second life, and a third, and so on. I’m annoyed by those who defy experience by saying, “Well, I haven’t met it yet; it hasn’t happened to me. Therefore, it has no authority.” I would be a poor person if the only things I knew were what I have found out for myself. There is today a general religious bias toward a galloping subjectivity. But our first obligation to a text is to let it hang there in celestial objectivity—not to ask what it means to us. A good sermon or a good teaching job must begin with angelic objectivity. The text had a particular meaning before I saw it, and it will continue to mean that after I have seen it. –Joseph Sittler.
The Best Teacher
A good scare teaches more than good advice.
Help from Experience
Two nimrods flew deep into remote Canada for elk hunting. Their pilot, seeing that they had bagged six elk, told them the place could carry only four out.
“But the plane that carried us out last year was exactly like this one,” the hunters protested. “The horsepower was the same, the weather was similar, and we had six elk then.”
Hearing this, the pilot reluctantly agreed to try. They loaded up and took off, but sure enough there was insufficient power to climb out of the valley with all that weight, and they crashed. As they stumbled from the wreckage, one hunter asked the other if he knew where they were.
“Well, I’m not sure,” replied the second, “but I think we are about two miles from where we crashed last year.”
Second Time
Don’t underestimate the importance of experience. It’ll help you recognize a mistake when you make it again.