Quotes About Wisdom

WHETHER people who are greatly respected know what they are saying: Laura (Riding) Jackson warns of the danger that "thinkers" can constitute for the rest of humanity.

Wilhelm thought, Why does it have to be me and my life that's discussed, and not him and his life? He would never allow it. But I am an idiot. I have no reserve. To me it can be done. I talk. I must ask for it. Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice. Why do I allow it?

You can't argue with success. Sure you can, Dahl said, when it's based on stupidity.

To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.

thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words

muitas vezes, quem sai vencedor de uma disputa deve sua vitória não tanto à correção de seu julgamento na exposição de sua tese, mas, antes, à astúcia e habilidade com que a defendeu.

B]eauty is always an affair of knowledge.

Het zou handig zijn wanneer je boeken koopt dat je de tijd om ze te lezen erbij kon kopen

Più intelligenza avrai, più soffrirai.

The middle ages showed us the results of thinking without experimentation, our present century shows us what experimentation without thinking leads to.

You don't have to be a person of influence to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked.

Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don't know as much as you thought you knew.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don't know why.

Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know

The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into reflections of their younger selves. They say things that make sense on some grammatical level, but it's not always connected to reality.

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend.

Persistence is useful, but there's no point in being an idiot about it.

the smartest man in the world

Cuando busque la verdad, su mejor opción es buscar una confirmación al menos en dos de las dimensiones que he incluido en la lista.

There was only one creature smarter than all of those doctors put together: the Internet. (Yes, it's a creature, okay?) I