Quotes About Wisdom

But not to know error is to lie, is to spit up poison through the harrowing margins of weakened mineral campaigns. It is the deeply filtered and the wretched who deny this, who test themselves with exoteric perfection, who turn their branded melodias to simple outward gain. In contrast to the rotation of immensity, to the treble glare of inward cyclical rarity, such outward wit carries less than the power of negation.

Never call anyone a baboon unless you are sure of your facts.

We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.

Ah, well! We live and learn, or, anyway, we live.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

true experts know the limits of their knowledge.

Judgment is not a synonym for thinking, and making accurate judgments is not a synonym for having good judgment.

Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

Everything makes sense in hindsight.

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.