Wisdom Quotes

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

Stephen Vincent Benet, Litany for Dictatorships, 1935

Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness.

Sacha Guitry

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

Charles Caleb Colton

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Thomas Jefferson

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander, Unidentified fragment

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

Plutarch

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Horace

Keep me away from the wisdom that does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Kahlil Gibran

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Martin Tuppe

I was very strange back then. I could see I had problems. I would sit in a closet a lot of the time and not come out, or I would sit up on top of my desk, or under my desk, or do weird things like get my wisdom teeth out and bleed all over the hallways.

Tim Burton, Burton On Burton

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names.

Chinese Prove

Cleverness is like a lens with a very sharp focus. Wisdom is more like a wide - Angle lens.

Edward de Bono, Textbook of Wisdom

Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.

John Patrick

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

Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom.

Chinese Prove

The Scripture vouches Solomon for the wisest of men; and his proverbs prove him so, The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame each of them by a single sentence, consisting of two or three words.

South

Philosopher A lover of wisdom, which is to say, Truth.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

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

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Chuang - Tzu, On Leveling All Things

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

Marilyn vos Savant

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

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

Sydney Harris

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Vernon Coope

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some people move our souls to dance. They awaken us to a new understanding with the passing whisper of their wisdom. Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon. They stay in our lives for awhile.

Unknown

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

Saint Augustine

If wisdom were offered me with this restriction, that I should keep it close and not communicate it, I would refuse the gift.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom, that he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he who thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

C. C. Colton

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

Henry David Thoreau, Wednesday, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Through me you pass into the city of woeThrough me you pass into eternal painThrough me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric movedTo rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save thingsEternal, and eternal I shall endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Dante Alighieri

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

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

Baltasar Gracian

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

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Walter Stegne

A man is getting along on the road to wisdom when he begins to realize that his opinion is just an opinion.

Author Unknown

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

Sir John Denham