Quotes about wisdom

I am not especially wise, but I am especially stubborn.

There is a wisdom of the Head, and … there is a wisdom of the Heart.

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it.

“Wisdom,” growled the Agirul. “Painful, isn’t it? We assume so much and resist learning to the contrary.”

Applied properly, it [logic] can overcome any lack of wisdom, which one only gains through age and experience.

It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry — much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!

Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.

The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.

Wisdom. No match for the troublemaker Curiosity.

Is there an inverse relation between knowledge and wisdom? At times it seems the more we know, the less we understand.

I am not the first to note this quandary. One scholar recently wrote, “Lysos and her followers chase the siren call of pastoralism, like countless romantics before them, idealizing a past Golden Age that never was, pursuing a serenity possible only in the imagination.”

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it.