Quotes About Wisdom

In times of dread it's good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

If you can't talk sense, don't talk at all.

You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It's why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes.

Not confidence—I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

I saw it happening but could not stop it. Humility came to me too late. I'm a living proverb; learn from me.

Existence is great but don't read so much into it.

And now, because a story is told for all, an admonition to the mindsick: Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.

I feel like a child. But I learn a little something every day. It's like a whole new way of living. It's a willingness to give up control. To make a commitment and have faith it'll work out.

Pratique ! Je me demande, mon fils, si tu comprendras un jour qu'oublier de l'être est parfois beaucoup plus amusant.

Serce ma swoje racje, o których nic nie wie rozum - Pascal

What ages you faster, suffering or experience?

The only knowledge that is worthwhile, writes Northrop Frye. is the knowledge that leafs to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life.

The end of learning, he said, is to "repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him" by acquiring "true virtue" (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney's point that the end of learning is virtuous action.

That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

Monarchy by itself stands for the absolute rule of the wise man or of the master; democracy stands for freedom. The right mixture is that of wisdom and freedom, of wisdom and consent, of the rule of wise laws framed by a wise legislator and administered by the best members of the city and of the rule of the common people.

The justice of those who are not wise appears in a different light when justice in the city is being considered, on the one hand, and justice in the soul on the other. This fact shows that the parallelism between the city and the soul is defective. This parallelism requires that, just as in the city the warriors occupy a higher rank than the money-makers, so in the soul spiritedness occupy a higher rank than desire.

W]ithout the chance presence of the Athenian stranger in Crete there would be no prospect of wise legislation for the new city. This makes us understand the stranger's assertion that not human beings but chance legislates: most laws are as it were dictated by calamities.

In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.

In alcuni casi cruciali, però, il disgusto è l'espressione emotiva di una saggezza profonda, cui la ragione non è in grado di dar voce.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.