Experience is a dear school, but it is the only one we are apt to learn in.
Meaning: Costly mistakes teach us what lectures cannot: wisdom requires personal suffering to become truly ours.
Origin: Adapted from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1743): "Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other." A dear school is an expensive one; the lessons of experience are paid for in mistakes.
More proverbs about Wisdom
- Better one eye than quite blind. — Partial knowledge or capability, however limited, surpasses complete deprivation.
- One may sooner fall than rise. — Damage spreads faster than repairs; decline requires less effort than recovery.
- Under water famine, under snow bread. — Hidden abundance often lies beneath apparent scarcity; adversity conceals resources invis…
- Fancy may bolt bran and think it flour. — Imagination can disguise inferior things as valuable when we fail to examine them closely.
- You may go farther and fare worse. — Pursuing distant goals risks worse outcomes than accepting present imperfect circumstance…
- Every one basteth the fat hog, while the lean one burneth. — Abundance attracts care and investment; scarcity receives neglect and harm.
From our idioms
- tirar de la manta — to reveal a secret or expose something hidden; to blow the lid off a situation.
- poner el broche de oro — To add a final, perfect touch that completes or perfects something.
- correrse una juerga — To live wildly or indulge in a bout of revelry and excess.