Quotes About Wisdom

Because the comic hero deviates, by the nature of his role, from social norms, he leads an alienated existence: he is slapped, reviled, insulted, treated as an outcast, disinherited. Yet he bears everything with the rigid patience of the wise Fool, whose foolery is in his passport to safety. (In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.

Good advice Is Rarer Than Rubies

Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness.

our lives teach us who we are

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.

Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.

the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.

had sought, and with that comprehension came a new clarity, a return to sanity, and even a kind of wisdom.

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.

People tend to focus on the magic more than the realism. But, like all fiction, fantasy arrives at truth via the road of untruth.

And so it's interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: 'I think it would be a good idea.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.