Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Wisdom

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

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

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

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

When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you life in the wisdom of the Self.

Bhagavad Gita

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month's study of books.

Proverb, Chinese

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

10.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.

Blake, William

16.

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

Epictetus

17.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

18.

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Blake, William

19.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

20.

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

Ward, William A.

21.

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

Elizabeth, Queen

22.

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

Garbutt, Frank

23.

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

24.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

25.

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

26.

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

Bible

27.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

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.

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

Borland, Hal

30.

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

Marx, Eleanor

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

34.

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.

Robbie Gass

35.

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

36.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Freud, Sigmund

38.

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

Butler, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Buddha

42.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

43.

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

Thurber, James

44.

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it, thou art a fool.

Azai, Rabbi Ben

45.

Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.

Lee, Robert E.

46.

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

47.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

48.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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

50.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.