Source identified1
Image design Midnight
Read & copy
“A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.”
Meaning & context
Holmes’s breakfast-table speaker argues that a concentrated moment of perception can sometimes yield understanding that ordinary experience accumulates only slowly.
Source details
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, Project Gutenberg #2665. The sentence appears in a reflection on young poets whose sensitivity can seem older than their years; it is literary-philosophical observation by the book’s conversational persona, not a measurable law of learning.