Quotes about wisdom and truth
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“It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.”
Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
As quoted in Investing with Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good (2016) by Jeremy Balkin
“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
This quote is often misattributed to Lincoln. The earliest instance that Quote Investigator could locate was "in an advertisement in 1947 for a book about aging by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D". The advertisement for “The Second Forty Years” which ran in the Chicago Tribune newspaper read like this: The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years! (Compare 1947 March 16, Chicago Tribune, “How Long Do You Plan to Live?”, [Advertisement for the book "The Second Forty Years" by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D.], p. C7, Chicago, Illinois. (ProQuest)). Source of misattribution: It’s Not the Years in Your Life That Count. It’s the Life in Your Years - Abraham Lincoln? Adlai Stevenson? Edward J. Stieglitz? Anonymous? by Quote Investigator on July 14, 2012 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/14/life-years-count/
To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run.
Adlai Stevenson II, Address at Princeton University, "The Educated Citizen" (22 March 1954) http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/stevenson/adlai1954.html. This has also been paraphrased "What matters most is not the years in your life, but the life in your years" and misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mae West.
Adlai Stevenson II, "If I Were Twenty-One" in Coronet (December 1955).
Misattributed
Variant: It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
If This Is a Man (1947)
Source: If This Is a Man / The Truce
“Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”
DIE ZEIT, 30. August 2007, Zeit.de http://www.zeit.de/2007/36/Interview-Helmut-Schmidt?page=all
Radio Interview, February 19 2005 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_31_2.MP3I studied that first Karpov-Kasparov match for a year and a half before I cracked it, what they were doing, and discovered that it was all prearranged move-by-move. There's no doubt of it in my mind.Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It’s a terrible game now. Very uncreative.
2000s
Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138. This may be an edited version of some nearly identical quotes from the 1929 Viereck interview below.
1930s
Context: I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
"A Plea For Intolerance" (1931)