Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

- Cato The Elder

Best Quotes about Wisdom

Many people might have attained wisdom had they not assumed they already had it.

The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness.

Cocteau, Jean

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, -- every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.

Marden, Orison Swett

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Bacon, Francis

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.

Robbie Gass

As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.

Buddha

The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around in it until he's completely draped in it. Then he'll stand up and go hey, I'm Vine Man.

Handey, Jack

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

11.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

Hoffer, Eric

12.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

13.

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.

Taylor, Sid

14.

The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

15.

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

Watson, Thomas J.

16.

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

Luther, Martin

17.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

James, William

18.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil -- not the strength to choose between the two.

Cheever, John

19.

The wisdom of a learned man comet by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. [Ecclesiasticus 38:25]

Bible

20.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Freud, Sigmund

22.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Butler, Samuel

24.

Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.

Covey, Stephen R.

25.

Wisdom is knowing when to speak your mind and when to mind your speech.

Evangel

26.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

The heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.

Proverb, Camerounian

28.

The end result of wisdom is... good deeds.

Talmud, The

29.

Some men are wise, and some are otherwise.

Smollett, Tobias G.

30.

The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.

Colton, Charles Caleb

31.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of face within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.

Coolidge, Calvin

32.

Now all the knowledge and wisdom that is in creatures, whether angels or men, is nothing else but a participation of that one eternal, immutable and increased wisdom of God, or several signatures of that one archetypal seal, or like so many multiplied reflections of one and the same face, made in several glasses, whereof some are clearer, some obscurer, some standing nearer, some further off.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

33.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Saroyan, William

34.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

35.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

Asimov, Isaac

37.

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristophanes

38.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.

Epictetus

40.

Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.