Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

Aristophanes

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

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, -- every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.

Marden, Orison Swett

The foolish sayings of a rich man pass for wise ones.

Proverb, Spanish

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Marilyn vos Savant

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

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

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

10.

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

Buddha

11.

Wise men still seek Him today.

Bell, Dan

12.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

Marx, Eleanor

14.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

Many people might have attained wisdom had they not assumed they already had it.

16.

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

Buddha

17.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Plato

18.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

19.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

24.

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

25.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

Bible

27.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

28.

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

Talmud, The

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything

Proverb, African

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Zenrin

38.

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

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.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

41.

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

Evans, Bergen

42.

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

43.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Santayana, George

44.

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.

45.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

49.

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

Bible

50.

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

Basho, Matsuo