A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no
longer indispensable.
-Richard Byrd
Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into
arrogant conceit.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to
bruise than polish.
-Anne Bradstreet
Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if
you listen.
-Carl Sandburg
But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom?
-John
Milton
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection which is
noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by
experience, which is the bitterest.
-Confucius
Cleverness is not wisdom.
-Euripides
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
-Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
Consistently wise decisions can only be made by those whose wisdom is
constantly challenged.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.
Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self- imposed
blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt
us or disappoint us.
-Stephen Colbert
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual
ignorance.
-H.L. Mencken
Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
-Axel
Oxenstierna (1583-1654)
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
-René Descartes
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call
to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
-Jean
Giraudoux
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon
the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes
wisdom through the awful grace of God.
-Aeschylus
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes a day. Wisdom
consists of not exceeding the limit.
-Elbert Hubbard
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
-Bertrand
Russell
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We
get very little wisdom from success, you know.
-William Saroyan
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.
-Edmund
Burke
Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.
-Larry Niven
He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.
-Benjamin Franklin
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
-Thomas
Jefferson
I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what
is called the realities of life for dreams.
-Hugh Walpole
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less
we use our power the greater it will be.
-Thomas Jefferson
I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
-Anatole
France
If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.
For there will be no one to carry our dreams across another Dark Age,
when the dust of all our cities incarnadines the sunsets of the world.
-Arthur
C. Clarke
If youth is wasted on the young, wisdom is wasted on the old.
(attributed)
-Alan Vanneman
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
-Anatole
France
It is astonishing what force, purity and wisdom it requires for a human
being to keep clear of falsehoods.
-Margaret Fuller
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of
wisdom to listen.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be
reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
-Mohandas
K. Gandhi
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the
audience is deaf.
-Walter Lippmann
It's amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.
-Robert
A. Heinlein
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.
-Hermann Hesse
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
Knowledge tells us that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom prevents us from
putting it into fruit salad.
-Miles Kington
Many a man might have known if he had but been aware that he did not
know. A sense of ignorance is the doorstep of the palace of wisdom.
-Charles
H. Spurgeon
Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix
admirably.
-Bertolt Brecht
Morality is temporary, wisdom is permanent.
-Hunter S. Thompson
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people,
to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them
in their mediocrity.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.
-Christopher
Reeve
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
-Juvenal
Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.
-Theodore Roosevelt
No state can be strong which excludes from its expressed wisdom, the
knowledge possessed by mothers, wives and daughters.
-W.E.B. DuBois
Now that I am 60, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from
currency.
-John Updike
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not
know.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is
often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
-Anna
Quindlen
Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so
far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.
-Robertson
Davies
Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our
foolishness.
-Sacha Guitry
Ours is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays.
-Aldous
Huxley
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
-Augustine of Hippo (St.
Augustine)
So when you pray, ask for wisdom and understanding. Don't bother asking
for anything else, because if you have wisdom and understanding you
don't need anything else.
-Tommy Chong
Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.
-Anton
Chekhov
Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.
-Bill Clinton
That is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise.
They grow careful.
-Ernest Hemingway
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes
the height of wisdom in another.
-John Stuart Mill
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to
set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht
The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful,
and then only for a short while.
-Albert Einstein
The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient
evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we
are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve
this good life, but it is by the cultivation of the virtues of
intelligence and courage, not faith and obedience, that we will most
likely be able to do so.
-Paul Kurtz
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of
events.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless
even to try.
-Mary Stewart
The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches
from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you
greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice
reached only from one end of the bar to the other.
-Edward R.
Murrow
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the
death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation,
and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
-Clarence Darrow
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but
the achievement of serenity within and above it.
-Reinhold Neibuhr
The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
-Antoine Bret
The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our
republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep
them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.
-P.J.
O'Rourke
The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between
brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and
unreasoning minds.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can
measure.
-William Blake
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience
for the benefit of the public.
-Samuel Johnson
The most certain sign of Wisdom is a constant cheerfulness.
-Michel
de Montaigne
The old- like children- talk to themselves, for they have reached that
hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it
in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's
beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secret are one's own.
-Eugene
O'Neill
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.
-H.L. Mencken
The possession of facts is knowledge, the use of them is wisdom.
-Thomas
Jefferson
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.
-Isaac Asimov
The saddest words of pen or tongue are wisdom's wasted on the young.
-James
Thurber
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good
grace in changing circumstances.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
-Lin
Yutang
The wisdom of the masses is not always... wise.
-Jon Stewart
The wisdom of winter is madness in May.
-Donald Swann
There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that
to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach
this stage of wisdom.
-Cornelia Otis Skinner
There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and
holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.
-Henry Ward
Beecher
There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right
and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.
-Jack
London
There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all
human beings are alike, and that all are different. On these two facts
all human wisdom is founded.
-Mark Van Doren
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always
been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight.
-Norman
Cousins
There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True
wisdom lies in making the right choice.
-Arthur C. Clarke
There is a wisdom of the Head, and... there is a wisdom of the Heart.
-Charles
Dickens
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and
that is character.
-H.L. Mencken
There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all
accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of
everything.
-Joseph Heller
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must
observe.
-Marilyn vos Savant
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
-Evelyn
Waugh
To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the
most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
-Henri
Frédéric Amiel
To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish.
-Euripides
Understanding is knowing what to do; wisdom is knowing what to do next;
virtue is actually doing it.
-Tristan Gylberd
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of
human wisdom.
-Leo Tolstoy
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a
journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
-Marcel Proust
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who
understands the wise is wise already.
-G.C. Lichtenberg
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the
ignorant.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom
and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling
into greater disasters.
-Robert E. Lee
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the
United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not
violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward
one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
-Robert
F. Kennedy
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The
cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries.
-T.S. Eliot
Whether a young man shall reap pleasure or pain from winning the objects
of his choice, depends, not only upon his wisdom or folly in selecting
those objects, but upon the right or wrong methods by which he pursues
them.
-Horace Mann
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave
to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
-Kahlil
Gibran
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
-George Santayana
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
-Norman
Cousins
Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up
all by itself.
-Tom Wilson
Wisdom is essential in a president, the appearance of wisdom will do in
a candidate.
-Eric Sevareid
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to
acquire it.
-Albert Einstein
Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.
-William
Wordsworth
Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.
-Thomas
J. Watson
Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where
you need it.
-Doug Larson
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have
preferred to talk.
-Doug Larson
Wisdom is the strength of the weak.
-Joseph Joubert
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely
because it comes late.
-Felix Frankfurter
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail
conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
-John Maynard
Keynes
-----
-----
(November 12 is the birthday of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Harry
Blackmun, Charles
Manson, and Neil
Young )
Categories:
Quotes of the day,
Wisdom
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