top of page

"Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Experience quotes

"Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."

"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."

"It is not age but experience that brings wisdom."

"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."

"No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination."

"I don't know of any other creature on earth other than man that will sit in a corner and cry because of some painful experience in the past."

"Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines."

"I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles


"There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be."


"Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them."


"Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real."


"Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped."


"Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care."


"I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment."


"In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me."


"Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism."
bottom of page