Quotes About Wisdom

Douglas E. Richards

Einstein had famously said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Thomas Babington Macaulay,

To be the master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it.

The great martial artist Bruce Lee had once commented, "If someone comes at you with a sword, run if you can. Kung Fu doesn't always work." In

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Luck favors the prepared mind, Major Long," said Li, quoting Louis Pasteur.

We can learn from our past mistakes. But we're not allowed to ruin the now by beating ourselves up over the then.

The purpose of consciousness—any consciousness—was to achieve infinite comprehension.

The dead keep their secrets. And in a while we shall be as wise as they." —Alexander Smith "Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?" ? Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet, (modern translation)

the longer the life-span, the more stagnant and ossified a species would become. There was something to be said for experience, but youth brought fresh blood and bold new ideas. A dose of much-needed vitality.

Knowledge is the food of the soul." —Plato

The great martial artist Bruce Lee had once commented, "If someone comes at you with a sword, run if you can. Kung Fu doesn't always work.

Looking stupid is part of learning, let it happen.

Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom. It is as true as sunbeams.

Can we always really look forward, as everyone endlessly advises us to do? Or do we have to hold on to certain key vestiges of our past- as painful, as terrible as they might be- as a way of understanding that there are certain things in life that change us so radically that they stay with us forever? Can we really close the door on that which still haunts us?

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.

I realize that advice is worth what it costs--that is, nothing.

The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.

Here is an inheritance of thought and culture and philosophy and religion which has nurtured people for thousands of years and may well fulfil you too.

All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible.