Bitter Experience Quotes

From bitter experience she knew that pictures thrown on the screen of her imagination could seem much more unnerving and terrible than the actual facts. ~ Hannah Hurnard

Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The problem is, hope is the thing that can't be reined in by rules or pinned down by bitter experience. It's a blessing and curse. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

Hope is the thing that can't be reigned in by rules or pinned down by bitter experience. It's a blessing and a curse. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

If things are tough, remember that every flower had to go through a whole lot of dirt to get there. So do not grieve about a bitter experience. The present is slipping by while you are regretting the past and worrying about the future. Regret will not prevent tomorrow's sorrows; it will only rob today of its strength. ~ Barbara Johnson

Bitter experience has taught me that you don't engage with intellectually superior wankers who make long speeches about moral relativism. ~ Alexis Hall

In Psalm 32:1 David reminded us that the blessed person is the one "whose transgressions are forgiven, / whose sins are covered." How sad that he learned the lesson through such bitter experience. The word covered in the Hebrew is kasah, and it means "to cover, conceal, hide; to clothe; ... to forgive; to keep secret; to hide oneself, wrap oneself up."14 When we try desperately to cover up our sinful ways, we are bound for disaster as sin perpetuates. Only through repentance will God "cover" us and "clothe" us with His loving forgiveness. Only when we run to Him in the nakedness of our sin will He wrap us up with "garments of salvation" and a "robe of righteousness" (Isa. 61:10). ~ Beth Moore

You never said you used to play Dungeon and Dragons, Lesley had said when I explained my reasoning. I'd been tempted to tell her that I was thirteen at the time, and anyway it was Call of Cthulhu, but I've learned from bitter experience that such remarks generally only make things worse. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

A bitter experience makes us a better person. ~ Saru Singhal

Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you - " "What ~ Jack London

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet. ~ Tom Parker Bowles

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. "Well, Lyndon," Mister Sam answered, "you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once." It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam. ~ David Halberstam

Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. ~ Neil Gaiman

A woman is not a whole woman without the experience of marriage. In the case of a bad marriage, you win if you lose. Of the two alternatives - bad marriage or none - I believe bad marriage would be better. It is a bitter experience and a high price to pay for fulfillment, but it is the better alternative. ~ Fannie Hurst

We cannot rely on ourselves, for we have learned by bitter experience the folly of self-confidence. We are compelled to look to the Lord alone. Blessed is the wind that drives the ship into the harbor. Blessed is the distress that forces us to rest in our God. ~ Charles Spurgeon

I think there is a limit beyond which free speech can't go….a limit that is very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy… I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I have the right to say and to believe anything I please, but I don't have the right to press it on anybody else. For example, take for instance the Catholic Church, which I am on good terms with, personally, but which I have no belief in whatsoever. I have a right to print my dissent from its doctrines, to utter them. I have exercised that right for many years. But I have no right to go on the cathedral steps on Sunday morning, when the Catholics are coming out from High Mass, and make a speech denouncing them. I don't think there is any such right. Nobody has got the right to be a nuisance to his neighbors, or to hurt his neighbor's feelings wantonly. If they come to him and say "What do you think of this Mass that we have just finished?", I think that he has the right to answer. But he has no right to press his opinions on them. Of course you'll notice the peculiar thing about the United States, where there is very little free speech. Free speech is a very limited right, in this country, as I have learned to my bitter experience, more than once. Yet, it is the country where the right to press opinions on reluctant hearers is carried to a development that is unheard of on earth. The whole country's full of propagandists who are bothering ev ~ H.L. Mencken

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Bitter experience has taught us how fundamental our values are and how great the mission they represent. ~ Jan Peter Balkenende

What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling like, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! ~ Charlotte Bronte

A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time ~ Homer

Colombia's advance to first rank among the criminal states in "our little region" is in part the result of the decline in US-managed state terror in Central America, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey 10 years later, leaving in its wake a "culture of terror" that "domesticat[es] the expectations of the majority" and undermines aspirations towards "alternatives different to those of the powerful," in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that is. ~ Noam Chomsky

They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge). ~ David Mitchell

Do we behave out of fear of punishment, or out of the demands of our heart? For me, it is the latter, as I would hope is true for all adults, thought I know from bitter experience that such is not often the case. To act in a manner designed to catapult you into heaven would seem transparent to a god, any god,for if ones heart is not in allignment with the creator of that heaven, then ... what is the point? ~ R.A. Salvatore

People have learned by bitter experience that the "European fraternal union of peoples" cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield. ~ Friedrich Engels

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people
always slow to move and irresolute
every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing. ~ Anton Chekhov

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. ~ David Ogilvy

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

True wisdom ... is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. ~ David Halberstam

You learn out of bitter experience, trial and error. Life teaches you that. As sincere as you all are, you can't learn it all in school. ~ George Cukor

What do you think of this stuff?' he asked.

I looked at the bottle and discovered that it contained a miracle udder liniment, guaranteed to reduce pain and swelling. 'I've seen the ad in the Dairy Exporter, but that's about it,' I said. 'Does it work?' Personally I doubted that it would, since it's a bit of a stretch to ask something you rub on the skin to kill the bacteria lurking in the tissues ten centimetres down, but I had learnt through bitter experience that belittling someone's pet alternative treatment is almost as offensive as telling them their kid looks funny. (My all-time low was attending a cat after-hours wearing a T-shirt which read Homeopathy, making damn-all difference since 1796, and then learning that the cat's owner was a certified homeopath.) ~ Danielle Hawkins

is speech a subject's very constitution and assembly, which then makes experience possible. ~ Erin Moure

I always say that in order to appreciate warm weather, you must experience cold. I wouldn't change one thing - all the embarrassing moments, the defeats, all of everything - through all of this, I have learned me. ~ Floyd Patterson

Now? I'm just another female faking orgasms to make a man not feel so inadequate. ~ Jess C. Scott

It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn't know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing - nothing comes of nothing - but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. ~ Adam Phillips

Somewhere along the way we realize our sensory experience is only part of reality and there's
an unseen dimension. We wrestle as we try to understand it - don't believe anyone who tells
you they don't. It's okay. It's in the wrestling where we find our faith. ~ Linda Hoye

The act of creation can be an extreme violent experience. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn

It is the small trivial things in life that makes a human happy, like opening a pickle jar. ~ KanyaACoffman

For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal. ~ Hermann Hesse

One of the best exercises in meekness we can perform is when the subject Is in ourselves. We must not fret over our own imperfections. Although reason requires that we must be displeased and sorry whenever we commit a fault we must refrain from bitter, gloomy,spiteful, and emotional displeasure. Many people are greatly at fault in this way. When overcome by anger they become angry at being angry, disturbed at being disturbed and vexed at being vexed. By such means they keep their hearts drenched and steeped in passion. ~ Francis De Sales

In a very simple way the amount of pain that a professional cyclist goes through, even on a normal day, far exceeds what most people would experience in their entire lives. ~ Charly Wegelius

I'm at my strongest when I'm able to let go, when I suspend my beliefs as well as disbeliefs, and leave myself open to all possibilities. That also seems to be when I'm able to experience the most internal clarity and synchronicities. ~ Anita Moorjani

Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are people who take delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful. ~ Mario Puzo

I was interested in getting courtroom experience. When I was a young lawyer, the only way I could get real courtroom experience was in the criminal law field. ~ Robert Shapiro

One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things. ~ Frank Herbert

When ye look at me I am an idle, idle man; when I look at myself I am a busy, busy man. Since upon the plain of uncreated infinity I am building, building the tower of ecstasy, I have no time for building houses. Since upon the steppe of the void of truth I am breaking, breaking the savage fetter of suffering, I have no time for ploughing family land. Since at the bourn of unity ineffable I am subduing, subduing the demon-foe of self, I have no time for subduing angry foe-men. Since in the palace of mind which transcends duality I am waiting, waiting for spiritual experience as my bride, I have no time for setting up house. Since in the circle of the Buddhas of my body I am fostering, fostering the child of wisdom, I have no time for fostering snivelling children. Since in the frame of the body, the seat of all delight, I am saving, saving precious instruction and reflection, I have no time for saving wordly wealth. ~ Milarepa

Caravaggio's art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio's images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning. ~ Andrew Graham-Dixon

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth. ~ Thomas Huxley

I refer to the awesome experience of Joseph Smith when he beheld God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ, in the spring of 1820. There has been no event more glorious, more controversial, nor more important in the story of Joseph Smith than this vision. It is possibly the most singular event to occur on the earth since the Resurrection. Those who do not believe it happened find it difficult to explain away. Too much has happened since its occurrence to summarily deny that it ever took place. . . .

"Since no one was with Joseph when this great vision took place in the wooded grove near Palmyra, a testimony concerning its reality can come only by believing the truthfulness of Joseph Smith's own account or by the witness of the Holy Ghost, or both. I have such a conviction. It is a sure conviction that lies deep in my soul. As a special witness of the same Christ who appeared with the Father and instructed the boy Joseph Smith, I bear witness of the truthfulness of the magnificent First Vision near Palmyra. I declare this in all soberness and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. ~ James E. Faust

The act of worship being a universally practiced form of devotion to God, a majority of the world's population finds it as a convenient mode to experience communion with God. It is the easiest way to attain inner peace and be blessed with divine grace. ~ Nihar Satpathy

Considering the extravagance of my expectations, the flying experience was bound to be a disappointment. ~ Edna Robinson

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies. ~ Yann Martel

Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness ~ Emmanuel Levinas

Experience will tell you if you need more of it. ~ Jack Gardner

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes
or napping, or shopping, or answering emails
to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one
and nothing
provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. ~ Jennifer Senior

I'd love to do live-action superheroes. And you know, I boxed for several years. I have some martial arts experience. ~ Josh Keaton

One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms. ~ Lewis Henry Steiner

Pigeons flew in diminishing waves between the low buildings. The sun rose. It said, Now that you've done this, you can never have that. Now that I'm like this, I can never go back. ~ Stephanie Danler

He felt as if someone had reached into his chest and cut off a tiny piece of his heart and made him eat it.
His heart tasted very bitter to him, and he hated Peter more than ever, although part of him still loved his
handsome older brother and always would.
And although the taste had been bitter, he had liked it.Because it was his heart. ~ Stephen King

The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. Interestingly enough, those new practices eventually sow the seeds of their own decay and lead to another period of revolution. Managers, therefore, experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period. ~ Larry Greiner

Baseball is a rookie, his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream. ~ Ernie Harwell

There's that stigma about New Yorkers, how they're so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway. ~ Taylor Kitsch

The view from space is like having a globe on your desk
it's a broadening experience. ~ Buzz Aldrin

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Humans grow a tree within their minds. A tree known as the self. It's a tree that is nourished through wisdom and experience, emotion and love. Each person has their own variety and type of tree. What kind of flowers will it grow? What kind of fruit will it bear? Who will it fascinate, what will it yield, how will it keep the pests away? What kind of poison will it possess? How tall will it grow? ~ Akira

The human birthright includes the possibility of an easy death at extreme old age if we are healthy. Alternatively, we may experience a lot of disease, but with medical intervention probably live almost as long, suffering from suboptimum health all the way through. It's our choice. ~ Steve Solomon

Right now, you are living off the fruits of millions of people in the past
who have made your life incomparably easier through their struggles
and inventions. You have benefited from an education that embodies
the wisdom of thousands of years of experience. It is so easy to take
this all for granted, to imagine that it all just came about naturally and
that you are entitled to have all of these powers. That is the view of
spoiled children, and you must see any signs of such an attitude within
you as shameful. This world needs constant improvement and renewal.
You are here not merely to gratify your impulses and consume what
others have made but to make and contribute as well, to serve a higher
purpose. ~ Robert Greene

You can say what you think music is, but the only way it really is, is how people experience it. ~ Stone Gossard

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more. ~ Sigmund Freud

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience. ~ Howard Schultz