
“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)
Gouverneur Morris to Robert Walsh ( February 5, 1811 http://www.bgdlegal.com/clientuploads/Publications/Publications/John%20Bush%20-%20Gouverneur%20Morris.pdf)
1810s
Life of Marcus Cato
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.”
Plutarch's Life of Cato
Variant: Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.
“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Context: Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.
Hyperion http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5436, Bk. IV, Ch. 8 (1839).
“Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.”