Wisdom Quotes

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.

Benjamin Franklin

A man may learn wisdom even from a foe.

Aristophanes

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

Francis Hutcheson

Above all, we must abolish hope in the heart of man. A calm despair, without angry convulsions, without reproaches to Heaven, is the essence of wisdom.

Alfred Victor Vigny

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

Henry David Thoreau

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have right that these wants should be provided for, including the want of a sufficient restraint upon their passions.

Edmund Burke

Whosover loveth wisdom is righteous, but he that keepeth company with fowl is weird.

Woody Allen, "Without Feathers".

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

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

Hal Borland

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.... God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

Pierre Charron

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

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

John Stuart Mill

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

G. K. Chesterton

For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom. For the uncontrolled there is no concentration, and for him without concentration, there is no peace. And for the unpeaceful how can there ever be happiness?

Unknown, The Bhagavad Gita

Under a ragged coat lies wisdom.

Romanian Prove

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Horace, Epistles

Common sense in an uncommon degree and is what the world calls wisdom.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

John Selden

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all possessions wisdom alone is immortal.

Isocrates

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

Joseph Addison

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.

Robbie Gass

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

John Buchan

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

Kahlil Gibran

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - From Live Without Principle.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Lin Yutang

The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.

Dr. Thomas Arnold Mindell

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Walter Lippmann

Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings.

R. W. Alge

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack.

Henry Mille

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.

Jane Austen, from a letter to her niece, November 18, 1814

Mingle some brief folly with your wisdom.

Horace

Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.

Cato the Elde

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Stephen Vincent Benet, Litany for Dictatorships, 1935

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky