Quotes About Wisdom

And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you're as likable as you're going to get.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost.

Like measles, love was the kind of thing you had to catch in youth, dispel, so that it would not leap upon you in old age and kill you.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You'll understand at midnight.

There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow ride... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market.

But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

One could not withdraw the days of one's youth in retirement and throw them on the fire to warm old bones.

She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.

This thought runs like a bright golden thread through the dark tapestry of our sorrow. We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life.

But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it's tricky if you have no self on which to rely.

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.

Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience

Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life.

As you ripen, you'll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

Books are not luxuries. They are the meat and drink for the mind.

So here's where we have to start if we are going to live as flourishing families in an age of easy everywhere: we are going to have to decide, together, that nothing is more important than becoming people of wisdom and courage. We are going to have to commit to make every major decision, and many small decisions, on the basis of these questions: Will this help me become less foolish and more wise? Will this help me become less fearful and more courageous?

If you want to be wise, then, the most important thing you can learn to do is worship.

you can't search for wisdom--at least, not online. And it's as rare and precious as ever--maybe, given how complex our lives have become, rarer and more precious than before.

It's not the accumulation of knowledge, but the realization of the self that marks the true power of the warrior.