Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Buddha

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Sophocles

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Bacon, Francis

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Bacon, Francis

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

Confucius

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

Without wisdom, knowledge is more stupid than ignorance.

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

Saroyan, William

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

10.

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

James Boswell

11.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

12.

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

Basho, Matsuo

13.

Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.

Lee, Robert E.

14.

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

15.

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

Twain, Mark

16.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

17.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

18.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

James, William

22.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

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

24.

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

Garbutt, Frank

25.

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

26.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

27.

Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her. [Proverbs 3:13-15]

Bible

28.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Gibran, Kahlil

29.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

31.

The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around in it until he's completely draped in it. Then he'll stand up and go hey, I'm Vine Man.

Handey, Jack

32.

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Blake, William

33.

The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise. [Proverbs 15: 31]

Bible

34.

The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness.

Cocteau, Jean

35.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

36.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

37.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

38.

Follow then the shining ones, the wise, the awakened, the loving, for they know how to work and forbear.

Buddha

39.

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

40.

Wise men still seek Him today.

Bell, Dan

41.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

42.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

43.

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

44.

Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.

Covey, Stephen R.

45.

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

Talmud, The

46.

It is not wise to be wiser than necessary.

Quinault, Philippe

47.

Committing a great truth to memory is admirable; committing it to life is wisdom.

Ward, William A.

48.

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

Kraus, Karl

49.

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.

50.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges