Quotes about wisdom and truth

„If our values don't align with the truth, they are valueless values. So our values determine our value.“

—  - Goa Kerle

„Speaking the truth is better than speaking one's mind.“

—  - Goa Kerle

„People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.“

—  Johnny Depp American actor, film producer, and musician 1963

„When you have something to say, silence is a lie.“

—  Jordan Peterson Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology 1962

„The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.“

—  Stephen King, book The Body

Different Seasons (1982), The Body

„Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures… And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.“

—  Douglas Coupland, book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

„Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Do you see that from drunkenness comes fornication, from fornication adultery, from adultery murder? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing? Do you make the anteroom of birth the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the woman who is given to you for the procreation of offspring to perpetrate killing? That she may always be beautiful and lovable to her lovers, and that she may rake in more money, she does not refuse to do this, heaping fire on your head; and even if the crime is hers, you are the cause. Hence also arise idolatries. To look pretty many of these women use incantations, libations, philtres, potions, and innumerable other things. Yet after such turpitude, after murder, after idolatry, the matter still seems indifferent to many men–even to many men having wives. In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks, invocations of demons, incantations of the dead, daily wars, ceaseless battles, and unremitting contentions.“

—  John Chrysostom important Early Church Father 349 - 407

St. John Chrysostom, Homily 24 on the Epistle to the Romans [PG 60:626-27] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/10/contraception-early-church-teaching-william-klimon.html

„Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.“

—  Axel Munthe Swedish physician 1857 - 1949

Source: supanet.com/find/famous-quotes-by/axel-munthe/a-man-can-stand-a-lot-as-fqb50991/

„The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.“

—  Werner Heisenberg German theoretical physicist 1901 - 1976

“Der erste Trunk aus dem Becher der Naturwissenschaft macht atheistisch, aber auf dem Grund des Bechers wartet Gott.” in 15 Jahrhunderte Würzburg: e. Stadt u. ihre Geschichte [15 centuries Würzburg. A city and its history] (1979), p. 205, by Heinz Otremba. Otremba does not declare his source, and the quote per se cannot be found in Heisenberg's published works.
The journalist Eike Christian Hirsch PhD, a personal acquaintance of Heisenberg, whom he interviewed for his 1981 book Expedition in die Glaubenswelt, claimed in de.wikiquote.org on 22 June 2015, that the content and style of the quote was completely foreign to Heisenberg's convictions and the way he used to express himself, and that Heisenberg's children, Dr. Maria Hirsch and Prof. Dr. Martin Heisenberg, did not recognize their father in this quote.
Statements similar to the quote were made by Francis Bacon, in "Of Atheism" (1601): "A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion", and Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Criticism" (1709): "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again."
There is a passage in a lengthy essay written by Heisenberg in 1942, "Ordnung der Wirklichkeit” ("Reality and Its Order"), published in Collected Works. Section C: Philosophical and Popular Writings. Volume I. Physics and Cognition. 1927-1955 (1984), that parallels the ideas expressed in the quote (albeit in a much expanded form):
"The first thing we could say was simply: 'I believe in God, the Father, the almighty creator of heaven and earth.' The next step — at least for our contemporary consciousness — was doubt. There is no god; there is only an impersonal law that directs the fate of the world according to cause and effect... And yet [today], we may with full confidence place ourselves into the hands of the higher power who, during our lifetime and in the course of the centuries, determines our faith and therewith our world and our fate." (English translation by M.B.Rumscheidt and N. Lukens, available at http://www.heisenbergfamily.org/t-OdW-english.htm)
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a protégé of Heisenberg, did publish a version of the quote itself in Die Geschichte der Natur (The History of Nature) (1948), appearing to consider it an adage:
"Aus dem Denken gibt es keinen ehrlichen Rückweg in einen naiven Glauben. Nach einem alten Satz trennt uns der erste Schluck aus dem Becher der Erkenntnis von Gott, aber auf dem Grunde des Bechers wartet Gott auf den, der ihn sucht. Wenn es so ist, dann gibt es einen Weg des Denkens, der vorwärts zu religiösen Wahrheiten führt, und nur diesen Weg zu suchen ist lohnend. Wenn es nicht so ist, wird unsere Welt auf die Religion ihre Hoffnungen vergeblich setzen." ("From thinking there is no honest way back into a naive belief. According to an old phrase, the first sip from the cup of knowledge separates us from God, but at the bottom of the cup God is waiting for the one who seeks him. If so, then there is a way of thinking that leads to religious truths, and to seek only that way is rewarding. If it is not so, our world will put its hopes to religion in vain.")
Misattributed

„Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?“

—  Ian McEwan, book Atonement

Source: Atonement

„When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.“

—  Yukio Mishima, book Thirst for Love

Source: Thirst for Love

„If even a single hair of my beard learns my secret, I will cut my beard from the root.“

—  Mehmed II Ottoman sultan 1432 - 1481

Source: Freely, John (The Grand Turk)

„But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.“

—  Evelyn Waugh, book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

„The Truth An Offense But Not A Sin“

—  Bob Marley Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician 1945 - 1981

„The true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions we uncover the laws of truth.“

—  Jagadish Chandra Bose Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist 1858 - 1937

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

„I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty … to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb.“

—  Ursula K. Le Guin, book The Language of the Night

And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
"Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" https://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&pg=PA44, in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

„The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. Come someday to my laboratory and see the unequivocable testimony of the crescograph.“

—  Jagadish Chandra Bose Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist 1858 - 1937

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

„The rite, therefore, enjoins upon us who are celestial by our nature, but who have been carried down to earth, to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primal source of being and the fount of life.“

—  Julian (emperor) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer 331 - 363

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)
Context: When the Sun touches the equinoctial circle, where that which is most definite is placed (for equality is definite, but inequality indefinite and inexplicable); at that very moment (according to the report), the Sacred Tree is cut down; then come the other rites in their order; whereof some are done in compliance with rules that be holy and not to be divulged; others for reasons allowable to be discussed. The "Cutting of the Tree;" this part refers to the legend about the Gallos, and has nothing to do with the rites which it accompanies; for the gods have thereby, I fancy, taught us symbolically that we ought to pluck what is most beautiful on earth, namely virtue joined with piety, and offer the same unto the goddess, for a token of good government here below. For the Tree springs up out of the earth and aspires upwards into the air; it is likewise beautiful to see and be seen, and to afford us shade in hot weather; and furthermore to produce, and regale us with its fruit; thus a large share of a generous nature resides in it. The rite, therefore, enjoins upon us who are celestial by our nature, but who have been carried down to earth, to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primal source of being and the fount of life.

„I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.“

—  Allen Ginsberg American poet 1926 - 1997