Wisdom Quotes

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

R. W. Alge

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

Mark Twain

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

Sandra Carey

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

Stephen Vincent Benet, Litany for Dictatorships, 1935

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

Churton Collins

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

Richard Needham

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - And stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove - Lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove - Lid again - And that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Mark Twain

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

William Frank Buckley, Jr.

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

That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.

Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus

Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance.

William Blake

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

James Ramsey

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Edward de Bono, Textbook of Wisdom

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

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Socrates

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

Pearl Buck

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

Felix Frankfurte

Some of the waiters discuss the menu with you as if they were sharing wisdom picked up in the Himalayas.

Seymour Britchky

My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.

Gene Oliver, Life and the Artistry of Change

Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.

Laurence Sterne

Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.

M Scott Peck

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Benjamin Disraeli

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Henry David Thoreau

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

H. L. Mencken

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

Baltasar Gracian

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom comes with winters.

Oscar Wildedmissions literature at Colby College.

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

Horace

A man may learn wisdom even from a foe.

Aristophanes

All is but lip - wisdom which wants experience.

Sir Philip Sidney

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

Science at best is not wisdom it is knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge tempered with judgment.

Lord Ritchie - Calde

Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.

Titus Maccius Plautus, Trinummus

He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.

Mary Howitt

Though a good motive cannot sanction a bad action, a bad motive will always vitiate a good action. In common and trivial matters we may act without motives, but in momentous ones the most careful deliberation is wisdom.

W. M. L. Jay

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

Sir John Denham

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander, Unidentified fragment

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

Walter Lippmann