
“There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.”
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus
Fragment 2, as quoted in Against the Mathematicians by Sextus Empiricus
Variant translation: So we must follow the common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.
Numbered fragments
τοῦ λόγου δ' ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
“There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.”
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus
“Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.”
Fragment 92, as translated by G.W.T. Patrick, trans.
Numbered fragments
Rex v. Rusby (1800), Peake's N. P. Cases, 193.
Speech in the House of Commons (21 July 1812), quoted in The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, Vol. XXIII (1812), column 1156
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
The Great Indian Novel
Variant: A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
Source: Literary Remains, Vol. 1
“If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom.”
As quoted in Giordano Bruno : His Life and Thought (1950) by Dorothea Waley Singer http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno03.htm#CH3
Context: If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom. What can Juno give which thou canst not receive from Wisdom? What mayest thou admire in Venus which thou mayest not also contemplate in Wisdom? Her beauty is not small, for the lord of all things taketh delight in her. Her I have loved and diligently sought from my youth up.