Quotes about wisdom
page 15

“The common law, though not to be found in the written records of the realm, yet has been long well known. It is coeval with civilised society itself, and was formed from time to time by the wisdom of man. Good sense did not come with the Conquest, or at any other one time, but grew and increased from time to time with the wisdom of mankind.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Rex v. Rusby (1800), Peake's N. P. Cases, 193.

Law, Sense, Time

“Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 1

Thinking, Time, Past, Dead

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to use it in a fruit salad.”

Brian O'Driscoll

O'Driscoll's widely quoted musing when asked to give his view on former Lions team mate and current England manager, Martin Johnson ahead of Ireland's Six Nations Championship match against England on 28 February 2009. Brendan Cole, " What Did BOD Mean? https://web.archive.org/web/20090228234200/http://www.rte.ie/ie/sportsixnations/entry/what_did_bod_mean", RTE Sport (February 27, 2009).

Knowledge, Funny

“When God first created man, He endowed him with the spirit of goodness. As a result, men were born with wisdom …. they took the Name of God and …. were liberated from the bonds of life. God thought, 'This will not do…. In the end….. He mingled in profuse quantities of the spirit of materialism and that of vanity. Now the game of life went on with a swing!”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 212-213]

Life, Men, God, Game

“There is oftentimes a great deal of knowledge where there is but little wisdom to improve that knowledge. It is not the most knowing Christian but the most wise Christian that sees, avoids, and escapes Satan's snares. Knowledge without wisdom is like mettle in a blind horse, which is often an occasion of the rider's fall.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 365.
Quotes from secondary sources

Knowledge, Horse

“Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

Books, School, Learning, Reading

“(…) When we are absorbed in other things, in the not-self, we forget the self. There is nothing unnatural about it. But, why forget the self through excess of attachment? Wisdom lies in never forgetting the self as the ever-present source of both the experiencer and his experience.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

I am
Source: I am That, P.135.

Forgetting

“As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all, and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I IT AM. That is to say, I IT AM, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I IT AM, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I IT AM, the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love: I IT AM, the Trinity, I IT AM, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: I am that maketh thee to long: I IT AM, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.
For there the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest: and of this Substantial Ground we have all our virtues in our Sense-part by gift of Nature, by helping and speeding of Mercy and Grace: without the which we may not profit.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 59

Love, God, Soul, Nature

“Nature utters her voice in lessons of heavenly wisdom and eternal truth.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Ch. 8 http://www.egwtext.whiteestate.org/col/col8.html, p. 107 Christ's Object Lessons (1900)

Truth, Nature

“Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these. enormous sacrifices have been offered.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Geschichte Als Schlachtbank
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 22 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Life, Happiness, People, Truth

“The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Practical Reason

Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

“The three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, aided by the highest and most sublime gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and counsel, unite the creature, the human spirit, with his God, the souls with the Word of God. It is this sacred union that you must seek, hold and possess; in it lie the spiritual life, health and strength, and from it originate all the other virtues.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

Life, God, Health, Lie

“You're dying to spend a night with me in the Palace of Wisdom. (to Kelly Kelly)”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

The Palace Of Wisdom

Night

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, God, Hostility

“Variant translation: "I saw the infinite, all-knowing and all-powerful God from behind as he went away, and I grew dizzy. I followed his footsteps over nature's fields and saw everywhere an eternal wisdom and power, an inscrutable perfection." (As quoted in History of Science, by Peter Whitfield”

Carl Linnaeus book Systema Naturae

2003), Scholastic Library Pub, p. 23.
Systema Naturae

God, Quotes, History, Nature

“It is for the legislature to alter the law if Parliament in its wisdom thinks an alteration desirable.”

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten (1830–1913) Anglo-Irish rower, barrister, politician and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary

Hamilton v. Baker, "The Sara" (1889), L. R. 14 Ap. Ca. 227.

Law, Thinking

“When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life. That is what great thinkers have taught me, above all the philosophers of the Far East, for whom true wisdom — which I am far from achieving — is the conjunction of samsara (the ordinary world) and nirvana (profound reality). To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

As quoted in 'Antoni Tapies', Serafin Garcia Ibanez, in the UNESCO Courier, June 1994.
1991 - 2000

Life, World, Thinking, Reality

“Outlaw consciousness is born the moment I drop out, stop the world, cease being an actor identified with the mythic roles I have been playing in society. Change begins when I do nothing except observe. The wisdom of the railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. Meditation is the healthy form of voyeurism.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 135

World, Change

“Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Fragments

“Rahula, whatever internally, belonging to oneself, is solid, solidified, and clung-to, that is, head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone-marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, contents of the stomach, feces, or whatever else internally, belonging to oneself, is solid, solidified, and clung-to: this is called the internal earth element. Now both the internal earth element and the external earth element are simply earth element. And that should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” When one sees it thus as it actually is with proper wisdom, one becomes disenchanted with the earth element and makes the mind dispassionate towards the earth element.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Sutta 62, verse 8, p. 528
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses)

Heart

“Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Police Shootings
1980s–1990s, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays (1987)

Understanding

“Our “Theories of Taste,” as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is “explained,” made mechanically visible, from “Association” and the like, …”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love, Men, Beauty

“He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.”

Michael Flynn book Eifelheim

Source: Eifelheim (2006), Chapter 5 (p. 234)

Age, Art

“And you can laugh
A spineless laugh
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you
And now we are one
In everlasting peace
We hope that you choke, that you choke”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Exit Music (For a Film)"
Lyrics, OK Computer (1997)

Peace, Hope

“When authoritarianism is no longer necessary to protect the welfare of the people, I will be the first to move for its dismantling. But the easy, casual wave of the hand dismissing the dangers that confront the worsening world situation and us is not for me. It is for those who insist that I dismantle martial law against my best judgment but, legally and morally, cannot be held liable for any Kampuchean-like tragedy that would be fall our people if I followed their advice. But I would be liable. I would be called all kinds of names. I would be called stupid, naïve and obstinate. History and our people would hold me accountable not only perhaps for lack of wisdom, but for lack of courage if I followed such advice.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Remarks at the inauguration of the Philippines Columbian Association's New Clubhouse Complex, Plaza Dilao, Manila (14 December 1979)
1965

People, Stupidity, World, Law

“Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 126-127

Life, Pleasure, Knowledge, Reading

“Common wisdom holds that the most complicated thing in the universe (asides fom the universe itself) is the human brain. In actual fact, however, other objects are even more complex – starting with human society, especially today’s hypermodern society, a product of thousands and even billions of human brains; not to forget globalisation and the Internet.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Source: The Epistemology of Social Science (2011), p. 115.

Universe, Forgetting

“We hang out with Mr. Fuji at the Palace of Wisdom.”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

The Palace Of Wisdom

“Aphorisms respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, but briefly.”

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

"Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality & Spirit" (2018)

Silence

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

God, Age, Education, School

“Mordeen said: "I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think."”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Mordeen on her love for Joe Saul in Act One: The Circus
Burning Bright (1950)

Love, People, World, Beauty

“It doesn’t mean I’m purer and nicer than others. But it means I have too much ignorance and mental defilement to remove.
I need Buddha's wisdom.”

Richard Gombrich (1937) British Indologist

"When I say I'm a Buddhist"[citation needed]

“When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

NYU Commencement Speech, Blank to Millennials: 'Make the Days of Your Life Matter'" https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/steve-blank-2016-commencement-speech-steve-jobs.html,"Steve, May 23, 2016.

Life, School, Quotes, Learning

“This higher will is felt in its relation to the impressions and impulses and expansive desires of the natural man as a will to refrain. … The failure to exercise the will to refrain in some form or degree means spiritual anarchy. A combination such as we are getting more and more at present of spiritual anarchy with an ever-increasing material efficiency—power without wisdom, as one is tempted to put it—is not likely to work either for the happiness of the individual or for the welfare of society.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "What I Believe" (1930), p. 12

Happiness, Exercises, Failure, Nature

“We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Five-sensed World (1910)

Imagination, Courage, Sense

“As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 245

Children, Youth

“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

Death, People, Fear, Family

“Almost every culture in the Thousand Cultures had some wisdom literature, and much of it was the same between any two cultures.... Cultures tend to be alike in much of what they think are the basic virtues, but one of the ones they are most alike in, though it rarely appears in their book of wisdom, is: Distrust strangers, fear foreigners, dread novelty.”

John Barnes book Earth Made of Glass

Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Books, Fear, Literature, Thinking

“One should follow a man of wisdom who rebukes one for one's faults, as one would follow a guide to some buried treasure. To one who follows such a wise man, it will be an advantage and not a disadvantage.
…
These teachings are like a raft, to be abandoned once you have crossed the flood. Since you should abandon even good states of mind generated by these teachings, how much more so should you abandon bad states of mind!
…
Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada
Unclassified

Love, Truth, Nature

“There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Source: Poetry and Craft (1965), p. 95

Knowledge

“It is impossible for any man, of late, to have set foot beyond the shores of these islands, without observing with deep mortification a great and sudden change in the manner in which England is spoken of abroad; without finding, that instead of being looked up to as the patron, no less than the model, of constitutional freedom, as the refuge from persecution, and the shield against oppression, her name is coupled by every tongue on the continent with everything that is hostile to improvement, and friendly to despotism, from the banks of the Tagus to the shores of the Bosphorus…time was, and that but lately, when England was regarded by Europe as the friend of liberty and civilization, and therefore of happiness and prosperity, in every land; because it was thought that her rulers had the wisdom to discover, that the selfish interests and political influence of England were best promoted by the extension of liberty and civilization. Now, on the contrary, the prevailing opinion is, that England thinks her advantage to le in withholding from other countries that constitutional liberty which she herself enjoys.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (18 June 1829) against the Duke of Wellington's foreign policy, quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 128-129.
1820s

Hostility, Happiness, Thinking, Freedom

“If we observe the aging of individuals, in the period after middle life, it seems to me that we can distinguish three ideal-typical outcomes. Some individuals bear within themselves some psychological sources of self-renewal; aging brings for them accretions of wisdom, with no loss of spontaneity and ability to enjoy life, and they are relatively independent of the culture’s strictures and penalties imposed on the aged. Other individuals, possibly the majority, bear within them no such resources but are the beneficiaries of a cultural preservative (derived from work, power, position, etc.) which sustains them although only so long as the cultural conditions remain stable and protective. A third group, protected neither from within nor from without, simply decay. In terms more fully delineated elsewhere, we may have autonomous, adjusted, and anomic reactions to aging.”

David Riesman (1909–2002) American Sociologist

“Clinical and Cultural Aspects of the Aging Process,” p. 484
Individualism Reconsidered (1954)

Life, Age, Penalty, Loss

“The credit we get for wisdom is measured by our success.”

Euripidés Hippolytus

Source: Hippolytus (428 BC), l. 701, translated by Edward P. Coleridge

Success

“"A Case I Won – But I Would Prefer To Have Lost”. Criticizing his own win, Nariman said “I don’t see what is so special about the first five judges of the Supreme Court. They are only the first five in seniority of appointment – not necessarily in superiority of wisdom or competence. I see no reason why all the judges in the highest court should not be consulted when a proposal is made for appointment of a high court judge (or an eminent advocate) to be a judge of the Supreme Court. I would suggest that the closed-circuit network of five judges should be disbanded.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

When he appeared in the Second Judges Case in the the Supreme Court Nariman which he won.
Fali S. Nariman, ‘Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography

“Every education minister today has a chance of introducing in his education today some simple technique, some simple natural insights into the total reality of life, which the physical sciences have explored in terms of “Unified Field”, which the ancient Vedic wisdom has located in the Self referral consciousness of everyone.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Quoted from: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Main Message - from Victory Day, October 21, 2007 Maharishi Channel http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/maharishi/videos/maharishi_main_message_2007

Life, Education, Nature, Reality

“Chance and change are busy ever;
Man decays, and ages move;
But His mercy waneth never;
God is wisdom, God is love.”

John Bowring (1792–1872) 4th Governor of Hong Kong

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 272.

Love, God, Age, Business

“Christ's method is divine. His words have the charm of antiquity with the freshness of yesterday; the simplicity of a child with the wisdom of a God; the softness of kisses from the lip of love, and the force of the lightning rending the tower. His parables are like groups of matchless statuary; His prayers like an organ peal floating round the world and down the ages, echoed by the mountain-peaks and plains into rich and varied melody, in which all devout hearts find their noblest feelings at once expressed, sustained, refined. His truths are self-evidencing. They fall into the soul as seed into the ground, to rest and germinate. He speaks, and all nature and life become vocal with theology.”

Edward Thomson (1810–1870) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 63.

Love, Life, God, Truth

“I fear that wisdom is disappearing from modern experience where everything becomes just information. Information is not wisdom. Wisdom is when things are integrated into a historical continuum and one’s personal life experience.”

Juhani Pallasmaa (1936) Finnish architect

The Aura of the Sacred lecture Juhani Pallasmaa's Agora lecture "Christianity as Secularisation" (15 August 2012).

Life, Fear, Personality

“Our high God is sovereign Wisdom of all: in this low place He arrayed and dight Him full ready in our poor flesh, Himself to do the service and the office of Motherhood in all things.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 60

God

“After further consideration, the herd of ponies had left off being frightened at all and had calmed down, and were now grazing in the home pastures, on the grass fields and gravel banks or in the home meadow close up to the farm. I stood at the window in that autumn light that makes the dead and the living more sharply discernible than the light of any other season. Yes, what a well-sculptured creature the pony is, so finely carved that even if there were no more than half a chisel stroke extra the workmanship would be ruined; that curve from neck to rump, and all the way down to the fetlock, is in actual fact a woman's curve; in the oblique-set eyes of these creatures lies buried a wisdom that is hidden from men but blended with the mockery of the idols; around the muzzle and the underlip hovers the smile that no cinema shark has ever been able to reproduce; and where is the female star who smells as wonderful as the nose of a pony?</b”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Men, Smile, Way, Home

“May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1998) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html 1990s

Understanding, Knowledge

“The first place he went into was the Royal Exchange, …. where men of all ages and all nations were assembled, with no other view than to barter for interest. … David … resolved to stay no longer in a place where riches were esteemed goodness, and deceit, low cunning, and giving up all things to the love of gain were thought wisdom.”

Sarah Fielding (1710–1768) British writer

The Adventures of David Simple, bk. 1, ch. 4 (1744), pp. 24-26

Love, Men, Age

“While doing justice to the intellectual power with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained their supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen, he believes that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves without comment on his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always be suppressed by slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles to infecundity, has condemned them to ultimate failure — "and herein," he says, "I see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing." For the rest, he begs his readers not to suppose that every minute detail in the daily life of Flatland must needs correspond to some other detail in Spaceland; and yet he hopes that, taken as a whole, his work may prove suggestive as well as amusing, to those Spacelanders of moderate and modest minds who — speaking of that which is of the highest importance, but lies beyond experience — decline to say on the one hand, "This can never be," and on the other hand, "It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it."”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Preface to the Second and Revised Edition (1884)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Life, World, Justice, Law

“Theology is an ungainly discipline. Unlike many other pursuits of wisdom, even its most fundamental principles are disputed by those who practice it.”

Roger Haight (1936) American theologian

Source: Dynamics Of Theology, Chapter Eleven, Dynamics of Theology, p. 215

“To seek wisdom rather than truth. It is more within our grasp.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Truth

“You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.”

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) American writer

" Lyman King http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lyman-king/"

Fate, Thinking

“Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

“Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

The Jatka (From the Attainment of the Buddhaship. Also is in the Nirvana Sutta.)
Unclassified

“Following the 2000 coup, this august house did not agree to forgive the perpetrators but you decided that justice will take its course. You are confronted with a similar decision now. The military humbly requests that you display the same wisdom then to protect our land now.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Excerpts from an address to Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs, 28 July 2005

Justice, Forgiveness, Decision, Housing

“3031. It is Wit to pick a Lock, and steal a Horse; but it is Wisdom to let it alone.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1735) : The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Horse

“Unpredictability is in general a fine protective feature, which should never be squandered but always spent wisely. There is much to be gained from communication if it is craftily doled out — enough truth to keep one's credibility high but enough falsehood to keep one's options open. (This is the first point of wisdom in the game of poker: he who never bluffs never wins; he who always bluffs always loses.)”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Truth, Game, Communication

“Let me remind you that science is not necessarily wisdom. To know, is not the sole nor even the highest office of the intellect; and it loses all its glory unless it act in furtherance of the great end of man's life. That end is, as both reason and revelation unite in telling us, to acquire the feelings and habits that will lead us to love and seek what is good in all its forms, and guide us by following its traces to the first Great Cause of all, where only we find it pure and unclouded.
If science be cultivated in congruity with this, it is the most precious possession we can have— the most divine endowment. But if it be perverted to minister to any wicked or ignoble purpose — if it even be permitted to take too absolute a hold of the mind, or overshadow that which should be paramount over all, the perception of right, the sense of Duty — if it does not increase in us the consciousness of an Almighty and All-beneficent presence, — it lowers instead of raising us in the great scale of existence.
This, however, it can never do but by our fault. All its tendencies are heavenward; every new fact which it reveals is a ray from the origin of light, which leads us to its source. If any think otherwise, their knowledge is imperfect, or their understanding warped, or darkened by their passions. The book of nature is, like that of revelation, written by God, and therefore cannot contradict it; both we are unable to read through all their extent, and therefore should neither wonder nor be alarmed if at times we miss the pages which reconcile any seeming inconsistence. In both, too, we may fail to interpret rightly that which is recorded; but be assured, if we search them in quest of truth alone, each will bear witness to the other, — and physical knowledge, instead of being hostile to religion, will be found its most powerful ally, its most useful servant. Many, I know, think otherwise; and because attempts have occasionally been made to draw from astronomy, from geology, from the modes of the growth and formation of animals and plants, arguments against the divine origin of the sacred Scripture, or even to substitute for the creative will of an intelligent first cause the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, they would reject their study as fraught with danger. In this I must express my deep conviction that they do injury to that very cause which they think they are serving.
Time will not let me touch further on the cavils and errors in question; and besides they have been often fully answered. I will only say, that I am here surrounded by many, matchless in the sciences which are supposed so dangerous, and not less conspicuous for truth and piety. If they find no discord between faith and knowledge, why should you or any suppose it to exist? On the contrary, they cannot be well separated. We must know that God is, before we can confess Him; we must know that He is wise and powerful before we can trust in Him, — that He is good before we can love Him. All these attributes, the study of His works had made known before He gave that more perfect knowledge of himself with which we are blessed. Among the Semitic tribes his names betoken exalted nature and resistless power; among the Hellenic races they denote his wisdom; but that which we inherit from our northern ancestors denotes his goodness. All these the more perfect researches of modern science bring out in ever-increasing splendour, and I cannot conceive anything that more effectually brings home to the mind the absolute omnipresence of the Deity than high physical knowledge. I fear I have too long trespassed on your patience, yet let me point out to you a few examples.
What can fill us with an overwhelming sense of His infinite wisdom like the telescope? As you sound with it the fathomless abyss of stars, till all measure of distances seems to fail and imagination alone gauges the distance; yet even there as here is the same divine harmony of forces, the same perfect conservation of systems, which the being able to trace in the pages of Newton or Laplace makes us feel as if we were more than men. If it is such a triumph of intellect to trace this law of the universe, how transcendent must that Greatest over all be, in which it and many like it, have their existence! That instrument tells us that the globe which we inhabit is but a speck, the existence of which cannot be perceived beyond our system. Can we then hope that in this immensity of worlds we shall not be overlooked? The microscope will answer. If the telescope lead to one verge of infinity, it brings us to the other; and shows us that down in the very twilight of visibility the living points which it discloses are fashioned with the most finished perfection, — that the most marvellous contrivances minister to their preservation and their enjoyment, — that as nothing is too vast for the Creator's control, so nothing is too minute or trifling for His care. At every turn the philosopher meets facts which show that man's Creator is also his Father, — things which seem to contain a special provision for his use and his happiness : but I will take only two, from their special relation to this very district. Is it possible to consider the properties which distinguish iron from other metals without a conviction that those qualities were given to it that it might be useful to man, whatever other purposes might be answered by them. That it should. be ductile and plastic while influenced by heat, capable of being welded, and yet by a slight chemical change capable of adamantine hardness, — and that the metal which alone possesses properties so precious should be the most abundant of all, — must seem, as it is, a miracle of bounty. And not less marvellous is the prescient kindness which stored up in your coalfields the exuberant vegetation of the ancient world, under circumstances which preserved this precious magazine of wealth and power, not merely till He had placed on earth beings who would use it, but even to a late period of their existence, lest the element that was to develope to the utmost their civilization and energy migbt be wasted or abused.
But I must conclude with this summary of all which I would wish to impress on your minds—* that the more we know His works the nearer we are to Him. Such knowledge pleases Him; it is bright and holy, it is our purest happiness here, and will assuredly follow us into another life if rightly sought in this. May He guide us in its pursuit; and in particular, may this meeting which I have attempted to open in His name, be successful and prosperous, so that in future years they who follow me in this high office may refer to it as one to be remembered with unmixed satisfaction.”

Thomas Romney Robinson

Robinson in his 1849 adress, as quoted in the Report of the Nineteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science https://archive.org/stream/report36sciegoog#page/n50/mode/2up, London, 1850.

Love, Life, Men, God

“"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)

World, Sadness, Faith, Feeling

“The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Epilogue, p. 305.
The Tao of Physics (1975)

World, Reality

“Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

St. 4. Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Star

“In succeeding to the throne of Mysore, I follow a great ruler who loved you all, and who won your love by his love of God, by his wisdom, his graciousness, his humility, his faithfulness to his duty and his Kingly greatness; …called upon people to ‘consecrate themselves in the spirit of unity and self sacrifice.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

On the occasion of his coronation, In Jaya Chamaraja Wodeyar http://www.mysoresamachar.com/j_wadiyar_ann1.htm

Love, God, People, Faith

“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it. In one chapter after another, I've described the ways in which imagination fails to provide us with accurate previews of our emotional futures. I’ve claimed that when we imagine our futures we tend to fill in, leave out, and take little account of how differently we will think about the future once we actually get there. I’ve claimed that neither personal experience nor cultural wisdom compensates for imagination’s shortcomings. I’ve so thoroughly marinated you in the foibles, biases, errors, and mistakes of the human mind that you may wonder how anyone ever manages to make toast without buttering their kneecaps. If so, you will be heartened to learn that there is a simple method by which anyone can make strikingly accurate predictions about how they will feel in the future. But you may be disheartened to learn that, by and large, no one wants to use it.”

Daniel T. Gilbert book Stumbling on Happiness

Source: Stumbling on Happiness, 2006, p. 223

Way, Error, Feeling, Imagination

“Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-by-case basis.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On legislating from the bench: Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=487&invol=654 (1988) (dissenting). 1980s

People

“And so the teaching (Torah) was likened to water: like water comes down from a high place to a low place, so the teaching descended from its honorable place, as it is His will and wisdom, and the light of Him that be blessed and thought cannot grasp it at all. From there it went in the secret stairway via the worlds, until it was dressed in material things and matters of this world, which are all the ordinants (mitzvot) and their ways, in combinations of material letters in ink on the book, twenty four books in the Tanakh, so thought will be able to comprehend it, and even speech and act, below the level of thought.”

Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812) Orthodox Rabbi, and the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad

V'lakhen nimshela hatora l'mayim: ma mayim yordim mi'makom gavoha l'makom namukh, kakh ha'tora yarda mi'mkom kvoda, sh'hi retzono v'khomato yitbarakh, v'orayta v'kodsha brikh hu kula had v'leyt mahshava tfista biah klal. W'misham nas'a v'yarda b'seter ha'madregot m'madrega l'madrega b'hishtalshelut ha'olamot, ad sh'nitlabsha b'davrim gashmiyim v'inyaney ha'olam haze, sh'hen rov mitzvot hatora k'khulam v'hilkhotehen, w'btzerufei otiot gashmiot b'dio 'al hasefer, 'esrim v'arba'a s'farim sh'batora nevi'im w'khtuvim, kdei sh'tehe kol mahshava tfisa bahen, v'afilu bhinot dibur w'ma'ase sh'lemata m'madregat mahshava tfisa bahen w'mitlabeshet bahen.
Sefer HaTanya (Book of the learner) Part I, Chapter IV

Secret, Books, World, Way

“There is no providence or wisdom of man, nor of any council of men that can foresee and provide for all events and variety of cases, that will or may arise upon the making of a new law.”

Robert Atkyns (judge) (1621–1710) Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Lords

11 How. St. Tr. 1208.
Trial of Sir Edward Hales (1686)

Men, Law

“To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos, not a philosophos [a lover of self, not a lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one’s whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 21–22
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Love, Truth, Lovers, Understanding

“Muhammad seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning, Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 6.4 (trans. Anton C. Pegis)

Men, People, Pleasure, Truth

“The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Quoted by: Philip Jenkins, God's Continent / Christianity, Islam And Europe's Religious Crisis https://books.google.nl/books?id=IilDVBzWiGAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22God%27s+Continent+/+Christianity,+Islam+And+Europe%27s+Religious+Crisis%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTy-arla3MAhVCQBoKHWTlAToQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22And%20for%20my%20part%20I%20cannot%20but%20believe%22&f=false, 2007, p.3 Source: The Great Heresies (1938), Chapter III

Future, Parting

“Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313
1960s

War, World, Way, Feeling

“Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Knowledge, Learning

“It has been accepted now that the joy of art is the heritage of all and aesthetic activity and appreciation are indispensable aids in the enrichment and refinement of the human soul in general. Art refines our inner as well as our physical life and provides that satisfaction and joy which acquisitions and activities on a merely material plane can never give. As Nachiketa said, na vittena tarpaniyo manushyo. In other words, man does not live by bread alone. Music and dance, among the arts, have always had a high place in Indian aesthetics. They are conceived as having their origin in the Divine, which is itself described the Upanishads as the quintessence of aesthetic pleasure raso vai sah.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

Our arts embody the deepest experience and wisdom of mankind, and they have a spiritual import and purpose.
During another lecture in Madras (now Chennai) based on his experience in Music having composed a number of kirtans on “Devi” . Quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life, Pleasure, Art, Music

“Silence is a great wisdom.”

Musa al-Kadhim (745–799) Seventh of the Twelve Imams and regarded by Sunnis as a renowned scholar

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 414.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Silence

“To those possessed of breeding, learning, handsome looks,
Who have no wisdom, neither discipline, you need not bow.
But those who do have these two qualities,
Though lacking other virtues, you should revere.”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

Letter to a Friend (Snow Lion: 2013), stanza 28

Learning

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)

Love, Justice, Feeling, Suffering

“One man I know, and one only, who can be praised for his achievements in this science. Of discourses and battles of words he takes no heed: he follows the works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to see dimly and blindly, like bats in twilight, he gazes at in the full light of day, because he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of everything in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds; he knows everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons, and the chase; he has looked closely into agriculture, mensuration, and farming work; he has even taken note of the remedies, lot casting, and charms used by old women and by wizards and magicians, and of the deceptions and devices of conjurors, so that nothing which deserves inquiry should escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection and is to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. As for reward, he neither receives nor seeks it. If he frequented kings and princes, he would easily find those who would bestow on him honours and wealth. Or, if in Paris he would display the results of his researches, the whole world would follow him. But since either of these courses would hinder him from pursuing the great experiments in which he delights, he puts honour and wealth aside, knowing well that his wisdom would secure him wealth whenever he chose. For the last three years he has been working at the production of a mirror that shall produce combustion at a fixed distance; a problem which the Latins have neither solved nor attempted, though books have been written upon the subject.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Tertium

Bridges assumes that Bacon refers here to Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt. Source: Opus Tertium, c. 1267, Ch. 13 as quoted in J. H. Bridges, The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon (1900) Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6F0XAQAAMAAJ Preface p.xxv

Women, War, Books, World

“Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether religious, political, or personal), the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring. We shall have only to follow, therefore, a multitude of heroic figures through the classic stages of the universal adventure in order to see again what has always been revealed. …the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 3

World, Universe, Personality

“'A woman's wisdom is her gift to women,'" Peggy quoted. "'Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God.'”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 10.

Love, Women, Men, God

“I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening, and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 13

Life, Sadness, Feeling, Knowledge

“Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.”

Charlton Ogburn (1911–1998) American journalist and author

The Maurauders (1959)
Introduction, page 6

Life, Universe

“When we say God is a spirit, we know what we mean, as well as we do when we say that the pyramids of Egypt are matter. Let us be content, therefore, to believe him to be a spirit, that is, an essence that we know nothing of, in which originally and necessarily reside all energy, all power, all capacity, all activity, all wisdom, all goodness.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 January 1820). Often misquoted as "God is an essence that we know nothing of" and attached to a part of his 22 January 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson.
1820s

God

“To see the one in the many is the casual vision of knowledge. To see the many in the one is the mission wisdom.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Knowledge

“Verily as there is a property in God of ruth and pity, so verily there is a property in God of thirst and longing. (And of the virtue of this longing in Christ, we have to long again to Him: without which no soul cometh to Heaven.) And this property of longing and thirst cometh of the endless Goodness of God, even as the property of pity cometh of His endless Goodness. And though longing and pity are two sundry properties, as to my sight, in this standeth the point of the Spiritual Thirst: which is desire in Him as long as we be in need, drawing us up to His bliss. And all this was seen in the Shewing of Compassion: for that shall cease on Doomsday.
Thus He hath ruth and compassion on us, and He hath longing to have us; but His wisdom and His love suffereth not the end to come till the best time.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 31

Love, God, Soul, Time

“In the midst of possible world war, of wholesale destruction, I find my only question this: are there enough people now who believe? Is there time enough left for the wise to act? It is a contest between ignorance and death, or wisdom and life. My faith in humanity stands firm.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

This I Believe (1951)

Life, Death, War, People

“To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971). "Masculist" is a coined word meant to correlate grammatically with "feminist."

Men, Justice, Dreams, Sex

“Abiogenesis has a decent amount of evidence behind it, but nowhere near as much as evolution does. So far we still don’t know which (if any) of the explanations posed for the origin of life is the most accurate one. But if there’s one thing the wisdom of the ages has taught us, it is that simply not yet knowing the real explanation is no reason to go and blame anything on magic. Besides, even if a god did appear and summon the first life into being billions of years ago, there is no question but that life has certainly evolved since then, and is still evolving now.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, God, Age, Question

“Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow up so,—alone with Nature and his own Thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Books, Age, World, Soul

“The wisdom of mankind creeps slowly on,
Subject to every doubt that can retard
Or fling it back upon an earlier time.”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

Orion (1843), Book iii, Canto ii.

Time

“The idea in anything is to use your technical knowledge, wisdom and love of the game to cut the odds down, to lower the risk.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Love, Game, Idea, Knowledge

“At the Palace of Wisdom they don't send a boy to do a man's job, they send The Shaman; the Shaman of Sexy. (in reference to Shawn Michaels and his theme song referring to himself as a Sexy Boy)”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

The Palace Of Wisdom

Boy

“We are only one of many groups through which the Masters of the Wisdom are working, and any group that forgets this is apt to become smug isolationist and, therefore, in imminent danger of collapse.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Forgetting

“Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

“The Forest is Crying”, p. 62
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)

Learning

“To me, there is no doctrine so infinitely absurd as the idea that this life is a probationary state—that the few moments spent here decide the fate of a human soul forever. Nothing can be conceived more merciless, more unjust. I am doing all I can to destroy that doctrine. I want, if possible, to get the shadow of hell from the human heart. Why has any life been a failure here? If God is a being of infinite wisdom and kindness, why does he make failures? What excuse has infinite wisdom for peopling the world with savages? Why should one feel grateful to God for having made him with a poor, weak and diseased brain; for having allowed him to be the heir of consumption, of scrofula, or of insanity? Why should one thank God, who lived and died a slave”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

Life, God, Fate, People

“Any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.””

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Sutta 62, verse 3, p. 527
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses)

Past, Future

“Now in those days, brethren, there shall arise in the world an Exalted One by name Maitreya (the Kindly One) an Arhat, a Fully Enlightened One, endowed with wisdom and righteousness, a Happy One, a World-knower, the Peerless Charioteer of men to be tamed, a teacher of the devas and mankind, an Exalted One, a Buddha like myself. He of His own abnormal powers shall realize and make known the world, and the worlds of the devas, with their Maras, their Brahmas, the host of recluses and brahmins, of devas and mankind alike, even as I do now. He shall proclaim the Norm, lovely in its beginning, lovely in its middle, and lovely in the end thereof. He shall make known the wholly perfect life of righteousness in all its purity, both in the spirit and in the letter of it, even as I do now. He shall lead an Order of Brethren numbering many thousands, even as I do now lead an order of Brethren numbering many hundreds.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha in Digha Nikaya as quoted in Avatars down the ages by Felicity Elliot http://www.shareintl.org/archives/AgelessWisdom/aw_fe-Avatars.htm Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Digha Nikaya (Long Discourses)

Love, Life, Men, Happiness

“Nature is what we see,
The Hill, the Afternoon—
Squirrel, Eclipse, the Bumble-bee,
Nay—Nature is Heaven.

Nature is what we hear,
The Bobolink, the Sea—
Thunder, the Cricket—
Nay,—Nature is Harmony.

Nature is what we know
But have no art to say,
So impotent our wisdom is
To Her simplicity.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Collected Poems (1993), p. 268-269. The Single Hound.

Art, Nature, Bee, Sea

Quotes about wisdom page 15

Quotes about wisdom
page 15