And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.

I should have been bolder and kissed her at the end. I should have been more cautious. I had talked too much. I had said too little.

You can never make someone like something they don't like, but you can always help them to better understand it.

Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who "do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.

He held out a shaky and worn hand and she met it with one of her young and inexperienced ones.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.

Inexperience can be overcome, ignorance can be enlightened, but prejudice will destroy you.

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

Optimists are usually inexperienced.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.

All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.

To sneer at his imperfect attempt was very bad breeding.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.