Quotes about wisdom

We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.

Leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

The sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.

The branch might seem like the fruit's origin:

In fact, the branch exist because of the fruit.

He has looked long at the stars, and that is the beginning of wisdom.

Mum said school mighta been different for me if I only give a damn. Maybe it was wasted on me like the teachers said. I didn't have any philosophy in me then, so I didn't know what to listen for. Most of it was pointless crap. Don't reckon I met a single wise person all the years I stayed but like I say, I wasn't paying close attention. And the thing is I miss it a bit. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say. I didn't know what I was, what I could do. Except the lame things I did do.

From Ushikawa’s perspective, they were irretrievably shallow. To him, their minds were dull, their vision narrow and devoid of imagination, and all they cared about was what other people thought. More than anything, they were completely lacking in the sort of healthy skepticism needed to attain any degree of wisdom.

Maybe that’s wisdom, seeing things that are obvious.

It was so absurd to die at sixty, anyway, and, as he saw it, it would be even more wasteful to die at eighty. A scheme of things in which the wisdom acquired in living was simply scrapped in this way was, to say the least, grossly inefficient. What did it mean? That somebody else would have to go through the process of learning all that life had already taken sixty years to teach him; and then be similarly scrapped in the end. No wonder the race was slow in getting anywhere—if, indeed, it were getting anywhere—with this cat-and-mouse, ten-forward-and-nine-back system.

'The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.'

'The wise lamb does not enrage the lion,' he said. 'It placates him, plays for time, and hopes for the best.'

Well. You were allowed to be young and stupid, when you were young and stupid, and if it didn’t do you in, you might get older and wiser.