Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

- Chaucer, Geoffrey

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Proverb, Camerounian

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Wisdom is better than weapons of war. [9:18b, Ecclesiastes]

Bible

Wise men still seek Him today.

Bell, Dan

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Mencken, H. L.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

Cato The Elder

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life -- in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Seneca

The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.

Gabirol, Ibn

10.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

11.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Basho, Matsuo

13.

Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.

Cullen Hightower

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

16.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius

17.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

Kings may be judges of the earth, but wise men are the judges of kings.

Gabirol, Ibn

19.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

20.

Wise care keeps what it has gained.

Proverb, Danish

21.

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

22.

It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.

Levenson, Samuel

23.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

27.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Saroyan, William

30.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristophanes

32.

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

Marx, Eleanor

33.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of face within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.

Coolidge, Calvin

34.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

James, William

35.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

36.

Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge shall every room be filled with precious and pleasant riches.

Bible

37.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

38.

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

Garbutt, Frank

39.

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

Cheever, John

40.

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.

Maeterlinck, Maurice

42.

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

Quintilian

43.

If you wish to know the road up the mountain, ask the man who goes back and forth on it.

Zenrin

44.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

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

46.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Socrates

47.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

48.

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

49.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

50.

The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.

Colton, Charles Caleb