Quotes About Wisdom

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

Corrupt influence, which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have right that these wants should be provided for, including the want of a sufficient restraint upon their passions.

The wise determine from the gravity of the case the irritable, from sensibility to oppression the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." [Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]

The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else.

Claudite jam rivos, pueri: Sat prata biberunt.

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Sometimes Christians speak of each decision of their lives as though they were launching a moon-shot where a single miscalculation would send the capsule into a trackless void. Even space scientist do better than that, correcting the flight of their space-probes by radioed signals. God does much better. He knows that we are often incapable of distinguishing trivial decisions from momentous ones, and that we are foolish and imperceptive. He knows---- and keeps us in his hand.

For deeds do die, however nobly done,And thoughts of men do as themselves decay,But wise words taught in numbers for to run,Recorded by the Muses, live for ay.

Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.