Quotes About Wisdom

When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities. Consider

Anyone untaught can do a wrong thing. But after he's been taught, there's no excuse to repeat it.

As well to clutch at the moon's reflection in a still midnight pond as to seek a grip on that bright mind.

It is irony, is it not, that you live so short a time, and waste so much of it being stupid?

All that is of dragons belongs only to dragons.

The truth doesn't need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you.

Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself. This is wisdom. Does it hurt? Does wisdom hurt? Does peace hurt? Does acceptance hurt?

Some memories are best left undisturbed. Sometimes, if you forget something, it's because it's better forgotten.

Forgiving the Day. Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day's pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight.

Wintrow's words seemed to echo through his bones. Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself. This is wisdom. Does it hurt? Does wisdom hurt? Does peace hurt? Does acceptance hurt? … He could not answer. He was suffused with the boy's simple faith. It rushed through him, warm and reassuring. Of course, he was right. Acceptance. He could not doubt or deny it." P. 190 Kennit

There's a difference between thinking an action is wise and doing it.

Better to regret unsaid words than repent of words I could never call back. Who

Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged.

Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

I don't understand," I said faintly. "You don't have to," he replied comfortingly. "Understanding how or why is very seldom as useful as understanding that things are.

For it is said, one may ask of the Elderlings, but what they answer may not be the question you ask, but the one you should have asked. And the answer to that question may be one a man cannot hear and live.

The Fool had always asserted that time moved in a great circle, but a decaying one, where at every turning humanity repeated mistakes, making them ever graver.

In a moment all became clear to me. How stupid could I have been?

Regrets are useless

Work, the old people say, keeps a man young. But perhaps that is something old folk say just because they know they must go on working.

no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.

It all seems pretty obvious now." "It usually is, after someone else thinks of it.

Is there anything more chilling than looking at a righteous fifteen-year-old and realizing he has the power to unravel your entire life?

enlightenment was merely the truth at the correct time.