Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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.

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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.

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

Marx, Eleanor

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

Zenrin

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

Bible

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Basho, Matsuo

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

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

Cato The Elder

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

Buddha

10.

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

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

12.

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

13.

The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise. [Proverbs 15: 31]

Bible

14.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

15.

Wise care keeps what it has gained.

Proverb, Danish

16.

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

17.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

20.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

James, William

21.

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

Ziggy

22.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Bacon, Francis

23.

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

Proverb, Chinese

24.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

25.

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

26.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of your times.

Bible

28.

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

Rowland, Helen

29.

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

30.

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

Blake, William

31.

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

32.

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

Bible

33.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

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

James Boswell

35.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

41.

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

Elizabeth, Queen

42.

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

Cullen Hightower

43.

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

Talmud, The

44.

Wisdom is knowledge, rightly applied.

45.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

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

Pindar

47.

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

48.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

50.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De