Quotes About Wisdom

Had there been management consultants in those days, they couldn't have devised a better or wiser compromise.

truth is so enveloped in mist and false representations that it is extremely difficult to know through what channel to seek it.

where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.

Washington had a more relaxed style with girls and used to say ruefully that he could govern men but not boys.

I never felt the need of scientific knowledge, have never felt it.

Yet he was extremely selective about the business he did and had learned the need for caution.

From the First Philippic of Demosthenes, he plucked a passage that summed up his conception of a leader as someone who would not pander to popular whims. "As a general marches at the head of his troops," so should wise politicians "march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to wait the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken ought to produce the event.

Waste neither time nor money" was his favorite motto.

Rockefeller advised silence, and Flagler desisted from further comment.

He added the important caveat that the war had been "a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.

Sometimes you can only understand why things happen when you see them in the rearview mirror.

Out of Chaos came light, Out of Will came life, Without form, without time From iron black space Through beads of crystal flame. Cosmic rays of light and sound, Spinning in seas of universal ether, Piercing the armatures of spheres. From the Mysteries—it comes. From Legend—it comes. From ancestors of a thousand ages—it comes. The Spirit, The Will, The Wisdom, Temple of Wotan.

a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.

wisely reconsidered and let the hand

Lincoln's genius was his ability to draw upon the talents of others, meld together diverse personalities who often did not trust one another, and then listen to their advice, recognizing that it was sometimes wiser than his own.

Lincoln learned self-discipline and the art of case preparation from Logan, who had served previously as a circuit judge and had taught Lincoln to see cases from every possible point of view.

Reading a book is like life: you live it one page at a time.

Never lend your name, or your money, or your books or your umbrella, or anything, to anybody - if you're wise.

Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

Facts are stupid things.

Trust, But Verify...Ronald Reagan

The best minds are not in government.