experience on Human Judgments

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs ...

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment.

Experience isn’t the best teacher—evaluated experience is.

I read of a young man who had just been appointed to the presidency of a bank at the tender age of thirty-two. The promotion was far beyond his wildest dreams and very frightening to him, so he went t...

In their excellent book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share the importance of recognizing the lens through which see the world: We speak as insi...

I like to say that generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.

Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . ...

The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys...

It takes fresh experiences, surroundings, and inputs for us to see familiar shadows in a new light.

That learning which thou gettest by thy own observation and experience, is far beyond that which thou gettest by precept; as the knowledge of a traveler exceeds that which is got by reading.

The habit of always putting off an experience until you can afford it, or until the time is right, or until you know how to do it is one of the greatest burglars of joy. Be deliberate, but once you...

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The stranger sees only what he knows.

No truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way-but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.

They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.

One simple sentence, from my first pastoral supervisor, has significantly shaped how I seek to discern God’s personal will. Each Wednesday during my first year of congregational ministry, we met to re...

Experience is overrated. Some people say they have twenty years’ experience, when, in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.

Ethnocentrism is the technical name for the view in which one’s own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

One of the gifts John Wesley left the church is the Quadrilateral. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral refers to the four ways we come to know something as true: Scripture (what the Bible teaches), tradition (...

Information alone never leads to transformation. Rather, it is what we experience as real on the inside that transforms us. That is all about the use of the imagination.

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

If we do not accept as good, God’s shaping of our person and life in our own culture, we will never be able to accept his work in the lives of others who are culturally different from us.

“We learn from failure, not from success!”