Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Cheever, John

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Buscaglia, Leo

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

Ziggy

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

James Boswell

Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.

Confucius

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

When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you life in the wisdom of the Self.

Bhagavad Gita

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

Boileau, Nicholas

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

Proverb, Turkish

10.

A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

11.

Some men are wise, and some are otherwise.

Smollett, Tobias G.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.

Buddha

15.

Without wisdom, knowledge is more stupid than ignorance.

16.

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

Young, Andrew

17.

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

18.

Wise are they who have learned these truths: Trouble is temporary. Time is a tonic. Tribulation is a test tube.

19.

Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.

Walt Whitman

20.

More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

21.

Who is wise? One who learns from all.

Talmud, The

22.

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

23.

Wisdom is knowledge, rightly applied.

24.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

25.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

26.

The end result of wisdom is... good deeds.

Talmud, The

27.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

28.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.

Titus Maccius Plautus

31.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

32.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

33.

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

Watson, Thomas J.

34.

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

35.

Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

36.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

37.

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

38.

Inner wisdom is more important than wealth. The more you spend it, the more you gain.

Oprah Winfrey

39.

They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

40.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

41.

What a wonderful world this would be if there were as many wise people as there are clever people.

42.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

Asimov, Isaac

43.

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

44.

The live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, who have renounced every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart.

Bhagavad Gita

45.

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

Twain, Mark

46.

The wise man sees in the misfortune of others what he should avoid.

Aurelius, Marcus