Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 11
Context: How much of what we do is free will, and how much is programmed in our genes? Why is each people so narrow that it believes that it, and it alone, has all the answers?
In religion, is there but one road to salvation? Or are there many, all equally good, all going in the same general direction?
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
“Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness…”
"The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932)
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Robert E. Howard 145
American author 1906–1936Related quotes

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

“Wit and wisdom are born with a man.”
Learning.
Table Talk (1689)

“But who would force the soul tilts with a straw
Against a champion cased in adamant.”
Part III, No. 7 - Persecution of the Scottish Covenanters.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)
“An epigram is the marriage of wit, and wisdom; a wisecrack, their divorce.”
20,000 Quips and Quotes (1968)

“[A proverb is] one man's wit, and all men's wisdom.”
Remark to James Mackintosh on October 6, 1830, reported in his posthumous memoir, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, Vol. 2 (1836), p. 472 http://books.google.com/books?id=wHM4AAAAYAAJ&q=%22one+man's+wit+and+all+men's+wisdom%22&pg=PA472#v=onepage
Variant: [A proverb is] the wisdom of many and the wit of one.

Autobiography of George Fox (1694)

“Philosophy … bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.”
“Logological Fragments,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #12

“3031. It is Wit to pick a Lock, and steal a Horse; but it is Wisdom to let it alone.”
Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1735) : The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)