Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

- Phaedrus

Best Quotes about Wisdom

Beauty is the wisdom of women. Wisdom is the beauty of men.

Proverb, Chinese

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. [1 Corinthians 3:18-19]

Bible

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

Saroyan, William

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.

Epictetus

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

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

Evans, Bergen

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

10.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

11.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

12.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

James, William

13.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

14.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

16.

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

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Maeterlinck, Maurice

19.

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

Young, Andrew

20.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

21.

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

22.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

Who is a wise man? He who learns of all men.

Talmud, The

24.

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.

25.

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

Butler, Samuel

26.

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

27.

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

Watson, Thomas J.

28.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

29.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

30.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

31.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

32.

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

33.

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

Buddha

34.

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

35.

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

Aurelius, Marcus

36.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

Timing, degree and conviction are the three wise men in this life.

Fitzhenry, R. I.

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd preferred to talk.

Larson, Doug

46.

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

Cheever, John

47.

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

Levenson, Samuel

48.

The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.

Gabirol, Ibn

49.

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

50.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig