Quotes About Wisdom

Of course it's always possible to gain time, put up a front, try to last it out - how long, a year, eighteen months? I'd rather leave the arena before I am beaten to a pulp and have to be dragged out. One has to know how to accept the inevitable.

When a man close to sixty decides to break with a young woman whom he loves, and who loves him, what would you call it? — Damned stupidity, sir. — Yes, damned stupidity; in other words, 'good sense'.

Chère Méditerranée ! Que ta sagesse latine, si douce à la vie, me fut donc clémente et amicale, et avec quelle indulgence ton vieux regard amusé s'est posé sur mon front d'adolescent ! Je reviens toujours à ton bord, avec les barques qui ramènent le couchant dans leurs filets. J'ai été heureux sur ces galets.

Les années passaient, je ne l'oubliais pas. J'avais parfois peur car j'avais encore beaucoup de vie devant moi et qu'elle parole pouvais-je donner à moi-même, alors que c'est Dieu qui tient la gomme à effacer ?

It's absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life's beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of civilization.

Or, il ne s'agissait nullement d'un délirant mais d'un cas extrême de cette connerie renseignée, informée sur tout, qui sait, qui « connaît » et à qui « on ne la fait pas ».

The grave doesn't hold any terrors for me, quite the contrary, just as long as I get there in full possession of my faculties.

I too have often felt the need to understand it all; but I know my limits. In my life I've done more suffering than thinking — though I believe one understands better that way.

Let's say that it's a good idea to see these things as they are, in order to gain some necessary detachment... — He gave a sad little smile. — I know, I know - the hardest peace treaties are the ones one has to conclude with oneself.

He wondered, with some annoyance, whether he would finally learn what he wanted to know, or if he would have in the end to content himself with what he already knew. He felt that, at his age, patience was ceasing to be a virtue and was becoming a luxury he could less and less afford.

His thoughts too were weary, and he felt a little sad to be so very old; it meant he had not much time left and would have to content himself with what he knew already.

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance.

Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

To understand everything is to hate nothing.

Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its SEED. Having Found the seed, let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Where ever it may blow, it will germinate. There is no lack in this wide universe of souls that will form the new ground.

Learn something every, second, every minute, every hour, every day, every month, and every year but remember what the purpose was for learning all those things.

From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.

From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets.

Analogies are like lies.

I didn't know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.

Those things: Mystery, Fate, and Enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world the young preside over.

In my errant life, I roamed to learn the secrets of women and men, of gods and dreams.