Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

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

- James Boswell

Best Quotes about Wisdom

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

Clemenceau, Georges

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .

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

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

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

Bible

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

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.

10.

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

Evangel

11.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

12.

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

Twain, Mark

13.

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

14.

The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

15.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

Phaedrus

16.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

Brecht, Bertolt

20.

Wisdom overcomes fortune.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

21.

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

22.

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

Garbutt, Frank

23.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

24.

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

25.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

26.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

33.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

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

35.

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

Ziggy

36.

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

37.

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

Ward, William A.

38.

He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.

Epictetus

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

The heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.

Proverb, Camerounian

42.

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

Cullen Hightower

43.

It is not wise to be wiser than necessary.

Quinault, Philippe

44.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Socrates

45.

No man is wise enough by himself.

Titus Maccius Plautus

46.

A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything

Proverb, African

47.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

50.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant