A Quote by H. L. Mencken
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
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Experience is the best teacher. But in our day and time, what we need is wisdom, because wisdom overcomes experience, because experience is wisdom, but there's a level of wisdom that overcomes the experience, and that's the experience that's already lived by others. I'm not trying to repeat the histories. I already learned from what they did.
Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.
Experience is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue.
Wisdom comes from experience, but experience is not enough. Experience anticipated and experience revisited is the true source of wisdom.
Huge studio movies are handed over to a man with less experience before they're handed over to a woman with less experience. That's a fact. But I think it's not just about men not hiring women: it's about women not hiring women, too.
But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.
The wisdom and compassion a woman can intuitively experience in childbirth can make her a source of healing and understanding for other women.
It has been my experience that women tell more intimate details to their friends than men do. Men may brag more, but women will talk the nitty-gritty and share the experience more.
Men have various subjects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel, and though they love to hear justice done to them where they know they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel and yet are doubtful whether they do or not.
Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity.
It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. It asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times. This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself.
As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.
That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.
Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.
Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.
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