Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

True wisdom lies in gathering the precious things out of each day as it goes by.

- Bouton, E. S.

Best Quotes about Wisdom

The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

The wisdom of a learned man comet by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. [Ecclesiasticus 38:25]

Bible

The heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.

Proverb, Camerounian

Wisdom is knowledge, rightly applied.

Now all the knowledge and wisdom that is in creatures, whether angels or men, is nothing else but a participation of that one eternal, immutable and increased wisdom of God, or several signatures of that one archetypal seal, or like so many multiplied reflections of one and the same face, made in several glasses, whereof some are clearer, some obscurer, some standing nearer, some further off.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

Nietzsche, Friedrich

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.

Epictetus

10.

We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.

Adams, James Truslow

11.

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

Marilyn vos Savant

12.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

13.

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it, thou art a fool.

Azai, Rabbi Ben

14.

By the time your life is finished, you will have learned just enough to begin it well.

Marx, Eleanor

15.

The man who questions opinions is wise. The man who quarrels with facts is a fool.

Garbutt, Frank

16.

I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.

Hesse, Hermann

17.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from the equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and manage a smile.

Hoagland, Edward

18.

Action should culminate in wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita

19.

Look at those they call unfortunate and at a closer view, you'll find many of them are unwise.

Young, Andrew

20.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

21.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

Wisdom hath her excesses, and no less need of moderation than folly.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

24.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil -- not the strength to choose between the two.

Cheever, John

26.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .

27.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

Luther, Martin

29.

Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning.

Evans, Bergen

30.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

Hoffer, Eric

31.

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

32.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

33.

Even though you know a thousand things, ask the man who knows one.

Proverb, Turkish

34.

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.

Borland, Hal

35.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Freud, Sigmund

36.

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

Buscaglia, Leo

37.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.

Taylor, Sid

39.

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

Kraus, Karl

40.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

41.

The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.

Gabirol, Ibn

42.

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

Francis of Assisi, St.

43.

The foolish sayings of a rich man pass for wise ones.

Proverb, Spanish

44.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Sophocles

45.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.

Twain, Mark

46.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Smiles, Samuel

47.

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

49.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

50.

Many people might have attained wisdom had they not assumed they already had it.