Quotes about wisdom

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Source: The Virgin Suicides

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

No Reservations - Machu Picchu
Context: It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Serenity
Source: As a Man Thinketh

"My Speech to the Graduates"
Side Effects (1980)
Variant: Mankind is facing a crossroad - one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction - I sincerely hope you graduates choose the right road
Source: Mere Anarchy

Source: West with the Night

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 294.

Variant: Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Source: The Spectator Bird

Source: Xenocide

Source: The Last Enchantment

Source: The Naming

Source: As quoted in Pearls of Wisdom: A Harvest of Quotations From All Ages (1987) by Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, p. 46. From The Importance of Living: "besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone" (p. 162), "the wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials" (p. 10).

Source: The Titan's Curse

Source: All the Little Live Things

Variant: Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.
Source: The Lightning Thief

Source: Intellectuals and Society

Source: Ink and Bone

Source: The Son of Neptune

Source: The Dharma Bums

Source: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Variant: The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
Source: War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869), Ch. I

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
Source: Why I Am An Agnostic and Other Essays

Source: Simply Irresistible

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
Variant: I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.

Source: The Excursion 1814

Source: The Godmakers (1972)

Source: Wizard's First Rule

Source: Sloppy Firsts

Source: Birds of Heaven

La sagesse n'est pas dans la raison, mais dans l'amour.
Les Nourritures Terrestres [Fruits of the Earth] (1897), book I
Source: Autumn Leaves

Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Summations, Chapter 44
Source: Revelations of Divine Love
Context: Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
Context: Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
In which marvelling he seeth his God, his Lord, his Maker so high, so great, and so good, in comparison with him that is made, that scarcely the creature seemeth ought to the self. But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God endlessly keepeth him.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Source: Dry

Source: Angels & Demons

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

Source: Lady Midnight

Source: The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

Source: The Queen of the Damned

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.

1963, Speech at Amherst College

Also: Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,— "Wait and hope".
Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117
Variant: All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

Source: Memories of Ice (2001)

Source: Selected Works

Source: The Complete Essays

Source: The Mark of Athena

Source: The Robber Bride

Source: Angle of Repose

Source: Aleph

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Source: The Name of the Wind

Source: The Titan's Curse

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

Source: Skinny Legs and All

Source: Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

A Preface to Morals (1929)

Interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173
Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, 72 (6), June 1948, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=0UMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA9: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex Johnson http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7406337/, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as discussed at Quote Investigator : "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown, But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/16/future-weapons/#more-679. The earliest found was from “Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, Col. 3. In this article Winchell wrote: <blockquote> Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war. “I dunno,” he said, “but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll be using spears!” </blockquote>
: It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere.
1940s
Variant: I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Gilead

Source: The Centaur (1963), Ch. 4

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 142
Context: “I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well.” She started pouring tea. “To start things off, what do you think of the world?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”
“You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.”
“It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?”
They both laughed quietly.

Source: The Complete Essays

Source: Ever After

The Roycraft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams (1923)
Source: The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days

Source: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

Source: The Complete Essays

Source: Letter to a Christian Nation

Source: The Giver

Knox College commencement address http://www.knox.edu/colbert.xml (3 June 2006)
Context: Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

Source: The Third Policeman (1967)

Source: Literary Remains, Vol. 1