“Experience” – Adlai Stevenson

“What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable… [It] boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions—a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see. ”

— Adlai Stevenson, in The Educated Citizen, an address to the Princeton Class of 1954.

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