Quotes About Wisdom

People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

You're just the romantic age," she continued- "fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty." - Hildegarde

But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

No one should live beyond 30

There's only one lesson to be learned form life, anyway, interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement. What's that? demanded Maury sharply. That there's no lesson to be learned from life.

You should have risen above it, I said smugly. It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at the people they've met before.

He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise

But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse. You're just the romantic age, she continued--fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love.

Such a pretty girl- to say such wise things.

There's only one lesson to be learned from life anyway.... That there's no lesson to be learned from life.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don't blame yourself too much.

and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

What is a gentleman, anyway? He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper.

It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth—a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men——

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single people to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.