1,312 Wisdom Quotes

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

Just as rust, which arose from the iron itself, wears out the iron, likewise, performing an action without examination would destroy us by projecting us into a negative state of existence.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.

All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I'm gone, I trust you will notice the river.

When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Only a fool thinks price and value are the same.

Education is the best provision for old age.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Truth is a golden thread, seen here and there In small bright specks upon the visible side Of our strange being's party-coloured web.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.

Sometimes the best way to be useful is to get out of somebody's way.

If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

The man of wisdom is the man of years.

Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.

An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.

To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

Eat in the dark the bargain that you purchased in the dusk.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.

There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

You'd learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news.

The gretteste clerkes been noght wisest men.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool.

How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up, becomes a gem!

The well of true wit is truth itself.

O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.

The living have never shown me how to live.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

All that I know I learned after I was thirty.

My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good.

Those wise men knew God to be in things, and Divinity to be latent in Nature, working and glowing differently in different subjects and succeeding through diverse physical forms, in certain arrangements, in making them participants in her, I say, in her being, in her life and intellect.

The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

She sings the songs without words Songs that sailors, and blind men, and beggars have heard She knows more of love than the poets can say And her eyes are for something that won't go away.

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Though wisdom is common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.

The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to a human. The wisest human will seem like an ape when compared to a god with respect to wisdom, beauty, and everything else.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.

Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.

Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

Genius sees the answer before the question.