Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

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

Bouton, E. S.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

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

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

Some men are wise, and some are otherwise.

Smollett, Tobias G.

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

Wisdom is knowledge, rightly applied.

10.

Wisdom overcomes fortune.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

11.

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

12.

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

13.

Who is wise? One who learns from all.

Talmud, The

14.

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

Evans, Bergen

15.

The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses.

Pindar

16.

Wise men still seek Him today.

Bell, Dan

17.

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

James Boswell

18.

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

19.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

Quintilian

21.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

22.

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

23.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

24.

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

Bible

25.

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

26.

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

27.

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

Ziggy

28.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Butler, Samuel

29.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

30.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Euripides

33.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

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

35.

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

Levenson, Samuel

36.

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

Garbutt, Frank

37.

The wise man says it cannot be done, but the fool goes and does it.

38.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

39.

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

40.

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

Buddha

41.

A life of frustration is inevitable for any coach whose main enjoyment is winning.

Noll, Chuck

42.

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

Confucius

43.

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

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

45.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

46.

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

Aristophanes

47.

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

Ward, William A.

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De