Quotes About Wisdom

Knowledge is like a floating log of wood that helps us stay afloat in the ocean of misery. To find the shore, we have to kick our legs and swim. No one can do that for us.

Should the urge to find a fixed single objective truth grip you, remind yourself: Within infinite myths lies an eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes Indra, a hundred You and I, only two.

The Gita we overhear is essentially that which is narrated by a man with no authority but infinite sight (Sanjaya) to a man with no sight but full authority (Dhritarashtra). This peculiar structure of the narrative draws attention to the vast gap between what is told (gyana) and what is heard (vi-gyana).

his brother the benefit of the doubt. Impatience is the enemy of wisdom; it propels us to jump to conclusions, judge and condemn, rather than understand.

All things are good and bad only in hindsight

When should we stop?' 'When your needs are met and before you fall prey to greed. Knowing when to stop is the hallmark of a good king,' said Krishna.

Arjuna, your mind is your friend and your enemy. If you control the mind, it is your friend. If your mind controls you, it is your enemy.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 5 and 6 (paraphrased).

Unlike dakshina, where wealth is asked in exchange, and bhiksha, where power is asked in exchange, in daan only wisdom is sought in exchange.

Indian philosophy separates what a man is from what he possesses. We are a set of thoughts and we have a set of things. Ram derives his strength from his thoughts, what he is, while Ravana derives his strength from his possessions, what he has. Ravana has knowledge; he may be learned, but he is not wise. Through Ravana, the bards draw attention to the learned brahmin priest who spouts hymns verbatim but fails to appreciate their meaning or transform himself because of them.

Within infinite myths lies an eternal truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes Indra, a hundred You and I, only two

Arjuna, your mind is your friend and your enemy. If you control the mind, it is your friend. If your mind controls you, it is your enemy.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 6, verses 5 and 6

His words contain the essence of Vedic wisdom, the keystone of Hinduism. Ramkrishna Paramhansa, the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic, said that the essence of The Gita can be deciphered simply by reversing the syllables that constitute Gita. So Gita, or gi-ta, becomes ta-gi, or tyagi, which means 'one who lets go of possessions.

while Tolkien's stories were not historically real, they were true

Probably we each could point to times in our own lives when if we had listened to someone's advice, we, too, could have avoided many problems.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you could put almost anything in the second half of this sentence, because the first half sounds clever and wise and must remind readers of the genius of Jane Austen.

Philosophy is just a hobby. You can't open a philosophy factory.

'Keep your head down at school.' Those are sage words from my dad. They kept me in check for years.

I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.

All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.

To our young selves, though, there is no difference between the small questions and the big ones. We follow our curiosity to the edge of our understanding and then ask whoever is around what lies beyond it. I have spent my adult life fighting to keep what I possessed as a child: the ability to see the biggest questions sitting inside the smallest ones and the willingness to try to answer them.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger

The moment that we think we know, we've lost our perspective on wisdom.

Thus Christianity becomes a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one's neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, "nothing" (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.

That's the best thing about little sisters: they spend so much time wishing they were elder sisters that in the end they're far wiser than the elder ones could ever be. —Gemma Burgess