The chief result gained by experience is clearness of view. This is what distinguishes the man of mature age… it is only then that he sees things plainly, and takes them for what they really are, while in earlier years he saw a phantom-world, put together with the whims and imaginations of his own mind… the real world was hidden from him, or the vision of it distorted. The first thing that experience does is to free us from the phantoms of the mind.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)