Quotes About Wisdom

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear.

You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The simple and familiar hold the secrets of the complex and unknown.

As you learn more, the fundamentals become at once simpler but also subtler, deeper, more nuanced, and more meaningful.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. —B. F. Skinner

It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you do know that ain't so. —Will Rogers or Mark Twain or someone else

The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that.

The simple and familiar hold the secrets of the complex and unknown. The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that. Today

The best place to find things: the public library.

If a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile...

Read to live, not live to read

We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.

He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.

Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each of these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the All-Good, the All-Powerful.

Consult not your friend; he is sensible and wise, but not now is his wisdom needed. There are times in life when from the imagination, and not the reason, should wisdom come, — this for you is one of them.

Alas! there is no fool like him who wishes for knowledge! It is only through woe that we are taught to reflect, and we gather the honey of worldly wisdom, not from flowers, but thorns.