Wisdom Quotes

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

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

Saint Augustine

Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom.

Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert

Where fear is present, wisdom cannot be.

Lactantius

Our humanity is trapped by moral adolescents. We have too many men of science, too few men of God. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience.

General Omar Bradley

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Greek Prove

There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart.

Charles Dickens

Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

Count Oxenstierna

Of all possessions wisdom alone is immortal.

Isocrates

I see no wisdom in saving up indignation for a rainy day.

Heywood

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

It does not take sharp eyes to see the sun and the moon, nor does it take sharp ears to hear the thunderclap. Wisdom is not obvious. You must see the subtle and notice the hidden to be victorious.

Sun Tzu, The Art of Wa

Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement... in relations between the two great nations on earth.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

Bertolt Brecht, The life of Galileo

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

Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.

Plutarch

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

Norman Douglas

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

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living the other helps you make a life.

Sandra Carey

Wisdom is harder to DO than it is to know.

Yula Moses

All is but lip - wisdom which wants experience.

Sir Philip Sidney

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Benjamin Disraeli

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

Jack Kerouac

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

William Faulkne

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuh

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far - Seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

Joseph Wood Krutch

To think ill of mankind, and not to wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

William Hazlitt

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

John Stuart Mill

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

If thou desire to purchase honor with thy wealth, consider first how that wealth became thine; if thy labor got it, let thy wisdom keep it; if oppression found it, let repentance restore it; if thy parent left it, let thy virtues deserve it; so shall thy honor be safer, better and cheaper.

Francis Quarles

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Robert Frost

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

H. L. Mencken

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

Horace, Epistles

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

Marilyn vos Savant

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

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, Antigone

Seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child.

Ron Wild