Quotes About Wisdom

Much testing, much reflecting, much living must intervene before we can say, 'My soul is my own.

read a poem every day and think about it

Birisini sevince onu de?i?tirmeye kalkmak yanl?? bir ?eydi.

No, that can't be so.' 'Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.' 'Oh please, may I have said something less banal. Please!

Slow Professors advocate deliberation over acceleration. We need time to think, and so do our students. Time for reflection and open-ended inquiry is not a luxury but is crucial to what we do.

Love books, love life

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

knowledge is power.

At my age, I don't plan that far ahead. I don't even buy green bananas." Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Today I think of myself as a 'recovering pessimist.' I know that optimism is not at odds with wisdom. It's quite the opposite. I think of cynicism as cool but lazy, while hope is desperately uncool—it has sweaty palms and an earnest smile on its face. What I know to be true is that one hopeful person will accomplish more than a hundred cynics. Why? Because the hopeful person will try.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica')

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?' 'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

general intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we're well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.

Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.