Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

- Immanuel Kant

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Butler, Samuel

Wisdom makes a slow defense against trouble, though a sure one in the end.

Goldsmith, Oliver

Who is wise? One who learns from all.

Talmud, The

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

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

Marx, Eleanor

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

Basho, Matsuo

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Edmund Burke

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.

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

Kraus, Karl

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.

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

James Boswell

12.

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

Rowland, Helen

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

16.

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

17.

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

Cheever, John

18.

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

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

Bible

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

23.

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

Zenrin

24.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

25.

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

26.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

27.

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

28.

Understanding the limitations of human beings as well as understanding your own is the beginning of true wisdom.

29.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

30.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Bacon, Francis

31.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

32.

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

33.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

37.

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

Gabirol, Ibn

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

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 wise person has long ears and a short tongue.

Proverb, German

44.

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

Saroyan, William

45.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

48.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

50.

Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of your times.