Don’t ever learn from experience

I'm listening to the audiobook of Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene at the moment, read by Jeremy Northam. I think I've read it before, but thankfully I can't remember the ending.

Greene has some great turns of phrase:

The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus – that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.

Wormold began to make faces in the glass.

"What on earth are you doing, Father?"

"I wanted to make myself laugh."

Milly giggled. "I thought you were being sad and serious."

"That’s why I wanted to laugh. Do you remember the clown last year, Milly?"

"He walked off the end of a ladder and fell in a bucket of whitewash."

"He falls in it every night at ten o’clock. We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience."

"Reverend Mother says..."

"Don’t pay any attention to her. God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man? It’s the scientists who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the trouble. Newton discovering gravity---he learned from experience and after that . . ."

"I thought it was from an apple."

"It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before Lord Rutherford went and split the atom. He had learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiroshima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash. Don’t learn from experience, Milly. It ruins our peace and our lives."

― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana