It has been said, “Not everything that is learned is contained in books.” Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?

At first glance, it seems that there isn't any big difference between knowledge gained through experience to the one gained from books. Yet, after a small amount of thinking time, the differences between them are growing.

Books or experience knowledge can be easily compared on two factors: age and availability. Let's consider the age factor first; a person can gain a certain amount of knowledge depending on his years of living, so the older he is, the bigger is his knowledge. This is relevant in experience knowledge, that as you live longer, you go through many situations in life. On the contrary, knowledge from books is not age dependent; you don't have to be in a certain age or life time in order to learn on a specific subject.

In the second factor, availability, it seems that experience knowledge has a greater one then book knowledge. In order to learn from books, you have to get access to a library or have enough income for buying them. On the other hand, for experience knowledge you don't have to pay or get access to specific facility. Life experience is free, you don't need to pay in order to gain experience from a situation, it is out there, you just have to go out and live it.

Although most people will not agree with me, personally, I think that knowledge gained from books is a much more important source then experience. The main reason is that when to learn from books, you don't have make a wrong decision to experience a specific situation BEFORE your learn from it. In other words, one can prevent a bad judgment, learn from others, or even learn about a specific issue even if he will never face it. The fact that someone has to go through a specific situation, with bad or good outcome, in order to gain knowledge through experience is a major disadvantage.

To summarize, although there are many factors to consider, I believe that the one I raised above is the most compelling one why to choose knowledge gained from books rather than experience