Quotes about wisdom page 5
“Wisdom is doing now what you are going to be happy with later on”
Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker
“Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author
“Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”
Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer
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.
Woody Allen book Mere Anarchy
"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
Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist
Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 294.
“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
Wallace Stegner book The Spectator Bird
Variant: Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Source: The Spectator Bird
“The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try”
Mary Stewart book The Last Enchantment
Source: The Last Enchantment
Alison Croggon (1962) contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist
Source: The Naming
Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living
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).
“Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious.”
Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher
“When ignorance is bliss, there's folly in wisdom.”
David Eddings (1931–2009) American novelist
“Evil is easy to fight. Lack of wisdom… that is very hard indeed.”
Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse
Source: The Titan's Curse
Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist
Source: All the Little Live Things
Laurie Colwin (1944–1992) Novelist, short story writer, food writer
“Even strength has to bow down to wisdom sometimes.”
Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief
Variant: Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.
Source: The Lightning Thief
“Wisdom's daughter walks alone,
The mark of Athena burns through Rome.”
Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune
Source: The Son of Neptune
Atul Gawande book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Source: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace
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
Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union
Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
Source: Why I Am An Agnostic and Other Essays
“I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.”
Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
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.
“Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Source: The Excursion 1814
“Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.”
André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist
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
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms
Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love
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.
Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Silence does not always mark wisdom.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author
Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher
Source: The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims
“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.
“Doubt is the origin of wisdom”
René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1963, Speech at Amherst College
“All human wisdom is contained in these words: Wait and hope!”
Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo
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". <br class="br"> Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117 <br class="br">Variant: All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope <br class="br">Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)
“We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
Source: Selected Works
“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
Source: The Complete Essays
“Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.”
Julian Barnes (1946) English writer
“Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.”
Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist
“Wisdom… is knowing what you have to accept.”
Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose
Source: Angle of Repose
“All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”
Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now
Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass
Source: The Amber Spyglass
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary
“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
“Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.”
Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher
Robyn Davidson (1950) Australian writer
Source: Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback
“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American journalist
A Preface to Morals (1929)
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
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 <br class="br">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><br>: It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere. <br class="br">1940s <br class="br">Variant: I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Source: Gilead
Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine
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.
Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
Source: The Complete Essays
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul
The Roycraft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams (1923)
Source: The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days
Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
Source: The Complete Essays
“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.”
Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor
Knox College commencement address http://www.knox.edu/colbert.xml (3 June 2006) <br class="br">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.
“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
Flann O'Brien book The Third Policeman
Source: The Third Policeman (1967)
“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
Source: Literary Remains, Vol. 1