“The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts”
Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet
"Modo di filosofare".
The Great Indian Novel
Variant: A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
“The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts”
Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet
"Modo di filosofare".
René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician
Source: Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (1929), p. 18
Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist
The Fourfold Treasure (1871) No. 991 http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0991.htm
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer
Siddhartha (1922)
Context: Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism
Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 116
Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. II Section I - Of The Eternity of Creation
Context: As creation was the result of eternal and infinite wisdom, justice, goodness, and truth, and effected by infinite power, it is like its great author, mysterious to us. How it could be accomplished, or in what manner performed, can never be comprehended by any capacity.
Eternal, whether applied to duration, existence, action, or creation, is incomprehensible to us, but implies no contradiction in either of them; for that which is above comprehension we cannot perceive to be contradictory, nor on the other hand can we perceive its rationality or consistency.
“Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Timothy Dwight IV (1752–1817) American historian
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 275.