Wisdom Quotes

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Our government sprang from and was made for the people - - Not the people for the government. To them it owes an allegiance from them it must derive its courage, strength, and wisdom.

Andrew Johnson

The extreme limit of wisdom - - That is what the public calls madness.

Jean Cocteau

There is no wisdom without love.

N. Sri Ram

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

Martin Tuppe

Surely, to think your own the only wisdom, and yours the only word, the only will, betrays a shallow spirit, an empty heart.

Sophocles

Knowledge, without common sense, says Lee, is folly; without method, it is waste; without kindness, it is fanaticism; without religion, it is death. But with common sense, it is wisdom with method, it is power; with clarity, it is beneficence; with religion, it is virtue, and life, and peace.

Austin Farra

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

Honore De Balzac

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

Lord 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.

Saint Francis of Assisi

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

Felix Frankfurte

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

James Abram Garfield

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

It is the province of knowledge to speak, It is the privledge of wisdom to listen.

Christine Lane

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.

Benjamin Franklin

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

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

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

Wilfrid Sheed

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

John Buchan