Quotes About Wisdom

The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don't need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don't have any use for it.

Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.

Abderian laughter. Inhabitants of ancient Abdera were known as rural simpletons who foolishly derided people and things they didn't understand. Thus these Thracians saw their name become a synonym for foolish, scoffing laughter or mockery. Though proverbially known for their stupidity, the Abderites included some of the wisest men in Greece, Democritus and Protagoras among them.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.

There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall (t)his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented.

The firmament payntit with sternis cleirFrom eist to west rolland in cirkill round,And everilk planet in his proper spheir,In moving makand harmonie and sound;The fyre, the air, the watter, and the ground—Till understand it is aneuch, I wis,That God in all His werkis wittie is.

Made us nobly wild, not mad.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Promises aren't received by asking the Lord for them, trusting him to give them to us, or confessing them. They are the life that emanates from obeying his commandments—Wisdom.

The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.

Youth is a disease that must be borne with patiently! Time, indeed, will cure it.

it is the moral state, rather than the intellectual, to which the Spirit of God speaks with the greater certitude.

Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

Hatfield and her colleagues sum up emotional contagion research with an Arabic proverb: "A wise man associating with the vicious becomes an idiot.

is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

Wise people "have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

As I wrote on the Harvard Business Review website in 2010, that's what wisdom means to organizational psychologist (and my intellectual hero) Karl Weick. Wise people "have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

This philosophy means that when you've entered a den of assholes, you do everything possible to get out as fast as you can—or, better yet, to figure out how to avoid that lair in the first place. I call this the "da Vinci rule." As Leonardo da Vinci put it, "It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

William Coyne, former head of research and development at 3M, tells how a human resource manager once threatened to fire a scientist who was asleep under his bench. Coyne took the HR manager to 3M's "Wall of Patents" to show him that the sleeping scientist had developed some of 3M's most profitable products. Coyne advised, "Next time you see him asleep, get him a pillow."3 Unfortunately, not all executives are so wise.

As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing.

Brain without heart is far more dangerous than heart without brain.