Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Bible

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Kraus, Karl

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

Cato The Elder

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

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

Buddha

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

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

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

Ward, William A.

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

Basho, Matsuo

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Wise care keeps what it has gained.

Proverb, Danish

13.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius

14.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

15.

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

16.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.

Taylor, Sid

20.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war. [9:18b, Ecclesiastes]

Bible

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Who is wise? One who learns from all.

Talmud, The

25.

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

Bible

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

Buddha

28.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

29.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding, for she is more profitable than silver and yields better returns than gold. She is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her. [Proverbs 3:13-15]

Bible

32.

The testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple. [Psalms 19:7]

Bible

33.

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

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 heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.

Proverb, Camerounian

36.

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

37.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Bacon, Francis

38.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

39.

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

Cheever, John

40.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

41.

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

Cocteau, Jean

42.

It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.

Menander

43.

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

44.

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

Cullen Hightower

45.

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

Evangel

46.

Action should culminate in wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita

47.

We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.