Quotes about wisdom

I am
Variant: Love says 'I am everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life flows.
Source: I Am That
Context: "I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says 'I am everything'. Wisdom says "I am nothing'. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both."

As quoted in Courage: the heart and spirit of every woman : reclaiming the forgotten virtue (2001) by Sandra Ford Walston

Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Variant: Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Context: O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Zion Train
Uprising (1979)

"Packard Goose"
"Joe's Garage Acts II & III" (1979)
Variant: Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.

From the same 24 March 1954 letter as above, p. 44
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Nahj al-Balagha

Die neuesten Arbeiten des Spartacus und Philo in dem Illuminaten-Orden (1794) pp. 9-10.

Other

#wisdom

Book III, ode iv, line 65
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

29a–b
Alternate translation: "To fear death, is nothing else but to believe ourselves to be wise, when we are not; and to fancy that we know what we do not know. In effect, no body knows death; no body can tell, but it may be the greatest benefit of mankind; and yet men are afraid of it, as if they knew certainly that it were the greatest of evils."
Plato, Apology

Paracelsus - Doctor of our Time (1992)

As quoted in Bird : The Legend Of Charlie Parker (1977) by Robert George Reisner, p. 27

Words spoken by Socrates to Antiphon in Memorabilia, 1.6.11.

Source: Common Sense

Epilogue, p. 328
My Country and My People (1935)

If This Is a Man (1947)
Source: If This Is a Man / The Truce

Ecclesiastes, 1:13 http://bible.cc/ecclesiastes/1-13.htm, New American Standard Bible

Misnad al-Imām al-Hādī, p. 304.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/26334898832] <br class="br">Tweets by year, 2010

Nahj al-Balagha

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 92.
Context: Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

οὔ τοι ἅπασα κερδίων
φαίνοισα πρόσωπον ἀλάθει᾽ ἀτρεκής·
καὶ τὸ σιγᾶν πολλάκις ἐστὶ σοφώτατον ἀνθρώπῳ νοῆσαι.
Nemean 5, line 16-8; page 222. (483 BC?)

Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984)
Context: A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. … For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

1980

Remarks on his abandonment of a personal account of the early history of the United States and the American Revolution, as quoted by Benjamin Rush in his memoirs.

Source: da I'm that)

Source: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Variant: There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom.
Source: On War (1832), Book 2

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

Source: The Tao of Pooh

Noah Brooks, scribe for the Sacramento Union, writing in the Harper’s Weekly for July 1865, 3 months after Lincoln had died, reported that the Lincoln once said this, at an unspecified date; as reported in &quot;Did Abraham Lincoln Actually Say That Obama Quote?&quot; by James M. Cornelius, The Daily Beast (9 August 2012) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/08/did-abraham-lincoln-actually-say-that-obama-quote.html <br class="br">Posthumous attributions

Source: The Normal Christian Life

Source: Hamlet

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol. 78, p. 6
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, Religious

Plato, Phaedo

Ecclesiastes 8:1-4 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/ecclesiastes/8/, NWT

Ecclesiastes, 1:18 http://bible.cc/ecclesiastes/1-18.htm, King James Version

William Scott Wilson, ‎Gregory Lee. Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors, 1982. p 95

Ethics of the Spirituals

122, in Moral Exhortation (1986), p. 33
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 10: Epicurus

One Love
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)

22c
Plato, Apology

The Fourfold Treasure (1871) No. 991 http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0991.htm

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 164

Letter http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/letters/toherzenandogareff.html to Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen and Ogareff from San Francisco (3 October 1861); published in Correspondance de Michel Bakounine (1896) edited by Michel Dragmanov

Facts are Facts (1954)

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.11

"A Piece of Steak" in The Best Short Stories of Jack London (1962) ISBN 0-449-30053-6

&quot;Letter to Menoeceus&quot; http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html, as translated in Stoic and Epicurean (1910) by Robert Drew Hicks, p. 167<br>Variant translation: Let no one delay to study philosophy while he is young, and when he is old let him not become weary of the study; for no man can ever find the time unsuitable or too late to study the health of his soul. And he who asserts either that it is not yet time to philosophize, or that the hour is passed, is like a man who should say that the time is not yet come to be happy, or that it is too late. So that both young and old should study philosophy, the one in order that, when he is old, he many be young in good things through the pleasing recollection of the past, and the other in order that he may be at the same time both young and old, in consequence of his absence of fear for the future. <br class="br">Context: Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.

The Counsels of the Holy Father St. Francis, Admonition 27.
Context: Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

The Sayings of the Wise (1555), p. 128

"Suzanne"
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Context: And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)
Context: I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual... the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative... the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.

Source: Antigone, Line 1347, closing lines

1978

2016

Liguori, A. M. (1882). Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity: In What True Wisdom Consists. In N. Callan (Trans.), Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year (Eighth Edition, p. 43). Dublin; London: James Duffy & Sons.

1997

1989

1980

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Included in Portrait-Life of Lincoln (1910) by Francis T Miller
Posthumous attributions

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front