Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Aristophanes

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Carlyle, Thomas

What a wonderful world this would be if there were as many wise people as there are clever people.

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

10.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

11.

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

12.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Russell, Bertrand

13.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Sophocles

14.

Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.

Lee, Robert E.

15.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

16.

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

17.

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

Garbutt, Frank

18.

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

Cato The Elder

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

21.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

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

Pindar

23.

The price of wisdom is eternal thought.

Birch, Frank

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

28.

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

Cheever, John

29.

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

30.

It is not wise to be wiser than necessary.

Quinault, Philippe

31.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

32.

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

Azai, Rabbi Ben

33.

Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning.

Evans, Bergen

34.

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

35.

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

36.

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

Thurber, James

37.

The end result of wisdom is... good deeds.

Talmud, The

38.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

39.

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

40.

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

Basho, Matsuo

41.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

43.

The wise person has long ears and a short tongue.

Proverb, German

44.

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.

45.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

46.

Action should culminate in wisdom.

Bhagavad Gita

47.

Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.

Titus Maccius Plautus

48.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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.

Coolidge, Calvin