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“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator, focalized through Lord Henry
The wit turns “experience” into a retrospective label for errors, suggesting that mistakes become useful only when understood.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 4; third-person narration focalized through Lord Henry reflects that experience is the name people give to their mistakes.
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“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”
Good relationships can improve judgment and character through challenge, conversation, and mutual influence.
Source note: Proverbs 15:1 in the King James Version; the proverb contrasts a soft answer with speech that intensifies wrath.
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“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Partial knowledge can produce misplaced confidence; the warning favors deeper study over shallow certainty.
Source note: An Essay on Criticism, Part II; Pope warns that shallow learning can produce premature confidence before deeper study tempers judgment.
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“Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart.”
Good reading can develop both judgment and moral feeling, making intellectual enlargement and character formation parts of the same educational process.
Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, section on Reading; Wollstonecraft argues for carefully chosen books rather than fashionable reading alone.
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“Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”
Circumstances can expose habits of thought and character that were already present, turning difficulty into information about what needs attention or change.
Source note: As a Man Thinketh; Allen uses circumstance as a mirror for character and habitual thought.
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“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
Thoreau treats reading as potentially transformative: a book can mark a genuine before-and-after point when it gives language to questions a reader has struggled to express.
Source note: Walden, chapter “Reading,” in the discussion of books that can reveal new possibilities and answer enduring questions.