Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

- Santayana, George

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Socrates

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

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

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all your getting get understanding.

Bible

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Euripides

14.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Buddha

20.

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

Marx, Eleanor

21.

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

22.

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

Pindar

23.

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

Zenrin

24.

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

Levenson, Samuel

25.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

Elizabeth, Queen

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Oprah Winfrey

28.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

29.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Bacon, Francis

30.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Marilyn vos Savant

31.

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

32.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

33.

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

Aurelius, Marcus

34.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

36.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

37.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

38.

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

39.

Without wisdom, knowledge is more stupid than ignorance.

40.

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

Proverb, Chinese

41.

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

Buscaglia, Leo

42.

Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.

Lee, Robert E.

43.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, --something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

Connolly, Cyril

44.

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, -- every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.

Marden, Orison Swett

45.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

46.

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

Butler, Samuel

47.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

48.

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

49.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

50.

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.