Quotes About Wisdom

Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Die knowing something. You're not here long.

Fiction doesn't tell us something we don't know, it tells us something we know but don't know that we know.

Intellect helps us to see the best means and manner of doing the right thing

Genius is Omniscience flowing into man. Genius is more than talent.

And the heart that abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works and will travel a royal road to particular knowledge and powers.

Wisdom is the power to perceive the best ends to aim at and the best means for reaching those ends. It is the power to perceive the right thing to do. The man who is wise enough to know the right thing to do, who is good enough to wish to do only the right thing, and who is able and strong enough to do the right thing is a truly great man.

Any man who develops the power to perceive truth, and who can show that he always knows the right thing to do and that he can be trusted to do the right thing, will be honored and advanced.

On the homunculus the shadow of doom announced by Spengler and Lawrence falls more tragically than on the proud. Oswald Spengler, the prophet of cyclical history, D. H. Lawrence, the psychologist of love and sex, and Henry Miller, the visionary who perceives his wisdom in the microcosm of the heart, are all contained in the boy-prophet Arthur Rimbaud and in Jim Morrison, the rock singer who strives to "break on through to the other side".

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons.

Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn't. (I mustn't.)

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

intellectual hare

No Eden valid without serpent.

sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man WITH SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH HIM.