Quotes about wisdom

Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom

Or poets with holy magic.

Hey-di-ho.

It makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

For the old do not really mind; in a strange way they become sufficient to themselves. They need so very little and they care so very little. They climb the mountain no one else can see and as they climb the old, once-valued things they’ve carried all their lives tend to drop away and as they climb the higher the knapsack that they carry becomes emptier, but perhaps no less in weight than it had ever been, and the few things that are left in it, they find, with some amusement, or those few indispensable belongings which they’ve gathered in a long lifetime of effort and of seeking. They wonder greatly, if they think of it at all, how it was left to age to winnow out the chaff they’ve carried all the years, thinking that it was valuable when it was only chaff. When they reach the mountain top, they find that they can see farther than they’ve ever seen before and with greater clarity and, if by this time they’re not past all caring, may bemoan that they must approach the end of their lives before they can see with this marvelous clarity, which does little for them now, but might, in earlier years, have been of incalculable value.

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

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

“You think we are in danger there?”

“Danger? It depends what you regard as dangerous. Some wisdom may be dangerous to one man and not to another.”

Knowledge ceases to be wisdom when one has no method for making sense or use of what one learns.

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.

If only we were wiser or better people perhaps the gods would explain the mad, unbearable things they do.

Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely.

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom, you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.