Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Wisdom

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

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

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

I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.

Hesse, Hermann

By others faults the wise correct their own.

Proverb

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

Kraus, Karl

Wisdom overcomes fortune.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

10.

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

Bible

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

13.

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

Bible

14.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

Without wisdom, knowledge is more stupid than ignorance.

17.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Euripides

18.

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

Oprah Winfrey

19.

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

Butler, Samuel

20.

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

Evangel

21.

Who is wise? One who learns from all.

Talmud, The

22.

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

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

24.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

25.

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

26.

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

27.

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

28.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

29.

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd preferred to talk.

Larson, Doug

30.

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

Boileau, Nicholas

31.

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

Buddha

32.

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

33.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

34.

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

35.

A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything

Proverb, African

36.

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

37.

Wise care keeps what it has gained.

Proverb, Danish

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

42.

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

Cheever, John

43.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

44.

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

45.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

46.

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

47.

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

Evans, Bergen

48.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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

50.

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.

Maeterlinck, Maurice