Wisdom Quotes

Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly.

Jonathan Swift

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

Mark Twain

In seeking wisdom thou are wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it thou are a fool.

Rabbi Ben - Azai

The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar minds - - Success.

Edmund Burke

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.

John Stuart Mill

The arts are the servant; wisdom its master.

Seneca

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

Francis Hutcheson

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

Baltasar Gracian

Until divinity decides to reveal the future to human kind, the sum of all human wisdom is contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.

Alexandre Dumas, Translation from "The Count of Monte Cristo".

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.

Mark Twain

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Honore De Balzac

No man is wiser for his learning, wit and wisdom are born with a man.

John Selden

There is no wisdom without love.

N. Sri Ram

A prudent question is one half of wisdom.

Sir Francis Bacon

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.

Sydney Harris

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Sigmund Freud

Where duty is plain, delay is both foolish and hazardous where it is not, delay may provide both wisdom and safety.

Tryon Edwards

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone? The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.

Lin Yutang, O Magazine, October 2002

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence... too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

Thomas Jefferson

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no happiness where there is no wisdom No wisdom but in submission to the gods. Big words are always punished, And proud men in old age learn to be wise.

Sophocles

Our experience is composed rathery of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

Joseph Roux

Who knows why we live, and struggle, and die... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Alan Stewart Paton

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

Sir John Denham

Wisdom comes with winters.

Oscar Wildedmissions literature at Colby College.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the part of wisdom to keep your word and the part of folly to count on other people keeping theirs.

Richard Needham

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.

Samuel Smiles

Knowing others is intelligence knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.

Lao Tzu

To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.

Churton Collins

You can buy education, but wisdom is a gift from God.

Author Unknown

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life - In firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Seneca

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Marilyn vos Savant

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Sir Arthur Eddington, Attributed in Robert L. Weber "More Random Walks in Science", 1982

Before we acquire great power, we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Robert Frost

To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.

Saint Augustine