The Book of Ammon
Context: Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one with love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.
“Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.”
“Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and wisdom.”
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.”
“Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.”
Address to the Knights of Columbus Council 969 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana https://web.archive.org/web/20050903023753/http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=2291 (January 2005).
2000s
“I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”
Source: Let the Great World Spin
“Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.”
“A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.”
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, p. 168.
“Just an ordinary in a world that loves the extra ordinary.”
Variant: He was ordinary in a world that loved the extraordinary.
Source: The Last Song
Letter to Hester Thrale (12 April 1781) http://books.google.com/books?id=184WAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA736
