Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Young, Andrew

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

Wisdom hath her excesses, and no less need of moderation than folly.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Action should culminate in wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita

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

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.

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

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

Buscaglia, Leo

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

10.

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

11.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

12.

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

Oprah Winfrey

13.

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

Marx, Eleanor

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

16.

The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around in it until he's completely draped in it. Then he'll stand up and go hey, I'm Vine Man.

Handey, Jack

17.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

18.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

20.

Even though you know a thousand things, ask the man who knows one.

Proverb, Turkish

21.

Wisdom overcomes fortune.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

22.

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

Levenson, Samuel

23.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

26.

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

27.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

28.

Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.

Cullen Hightower

29.

The heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.

Proverb, Camerounian

30.

Wise care keeps what it has gained.

Proverb, Danish

31.

Wisdom is knowing when to speak your mind and when to mind your speech.

Evangel

32.

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

Cheever, John

33.

Some men are wise, and some are otherwise.

Smollett, Tobias G.

34.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Euripides

35.

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

36.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Garbutt, Frank

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Twain, Mark

45.

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

46.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life -- in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Seneca

47.

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

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

Proverb, Chinese

49.

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

James Boswell

50.

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