“Cleverness is not wisdom. And not to think mortal thoughts is to see few days.”

Bacchæ l. 395
Source: The Bacchae

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cleverness is not wisdom. And not to think mortal thoughts is to see few days." by Euripidés?
Euripidés photo
Euripidés 116
ancient Athenian playwright -480–-406 BC

Related quotes

Euripidés photo

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

“Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.”

Martin Ryle (1918–1984) English radio astronomer

in a letter http://www.scribd.com/doc/5062627/Ryle to Professor Carlos Chagas, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 24 February 1983.
Context: The benefits of medical research are real - but so are the potential horrors of genetic engineering and embryo manipulation. We devise heart transplants, but do little for the 15 million who die annually of malnutrition and related diseases. Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.

“The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 35.

“A clever mind is not a heart. Knowledge doesn't really care, wisdom does.”

The Now of Pooh.
Source: The Tao of Pooh (1982)
Context: Abstract cleverness of the mind only separates the thinker from the world of reality, and that world, the Forest of Real Life, is in a desperate condition now because of too many who think too much and care too little. In spite of what many minds have thought themselves into believing, that mistake cannot continue for much longer if everything is going to survive. The one chance we have to avoid certain disaster is to change our approach, and learn to value wisdom and contentment. These are things that are being searched for anyway, through Knowledge and Cleverness, but they do not come from Knowledge and Cleverness. They never have, and they never will. We can no longer afford to look so desperately hard for something in the wrong way and in the wrong place. If Knowledge and Cleverness are allowed to go on wrecking things, they will before much longer destroy all life on this earth as we know it, and what little may temporarily survive will not be worth looking at, even if it were possible for us to do so.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 441, trans. Stopp

Variant translation: All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Karl Pilkington photo

“I think it's clever how Rome have kept a load of old stuff. There's no overheads, yet people are going over there to see it.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

3 Minute Wonder, Episode 2
On Travel

Aleister Crowley photo

“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

Stephen King photo

Related topics