“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Related quotes
“Wisdom's daughter walks alone,
The mark of Athena burns through Rome.”
Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune
Source: The Son of Neptune
“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Context: Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
“Justice turns the scale
For those to whom through pain
At last comes wisdom's gain.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 250–251 (tr. E. H. Plumptre)
Yukio Mishima book Sun and Steel
Source: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 87.
Context: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada
Larry King Live television program (September 9, 2005)
2007, 2008
Variant translations: <br class="br">Zeus has led us on to know,<br>the Helmsman lays it down as law<br>that we must suffer, suffer into truth.<br>We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart<br>the pain of pain remembered comes again,<br>and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.<br>From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench<br>there comes a violent love. <br class="br">Robert Fagles, The Oresteia (1975) <br class="br">God, whose law it is<br>that he who learns must suffer.<br>And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget<br>falls drop by drop upon the heart,<br>and in our own despite, against our will,<br>comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. <br class="br">Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930), pp. 61 and 194 ( Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=D3QwvF3GWOkC&lpg=PA61&ots=BacvHvGm6e&dq=%22And%20in%20our%20own%20despite%2C%20against%20our%20will%2C%20Comes%20wisdom%22%20-kennedy&pg=PA194#v=onepage&q=%22our%20own%20despite%22&f=false) <br class="br">Robert F. Kennedy quoted these lines in his speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April 1968. His version http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfkonmlkdeath.html: <br class="br">Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget<br>falls drop by drop upon the heart<br>until, in our own despair, against our will,<br>comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. <br class="br">Variant translations of πάθει μάθος: <br class="br">By suffering comes wisdom. <br class="br">The reward of suffering is experience. <br class="br">Wisdom comes alone through suffering. <br class="br">Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 176–183, as translated by Ian Johnston ( Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=qz1HpBZ1fTwC&lpg=PA13&ots=C7aohrZRF1&dq=Drips%20in%20our%20hearts%20as%20we%20try%20to%20sleep%2C&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=Drips%20in%20our%20hearts%20as%20we%20try%20to%20sleep,&f=false)
“Wisdom sits alone
Topmost in Heaven.”
Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) American magazine writer, editor, and publisher
The Scholar of Thibet.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)
