Quotes About Wisdom

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

Wolf's wits, moving now, in spite of the fumes of smoke and alcohol, with restored clarity, achieved a momentous orientation of many obscure matters.

Christ's humor is always redemptive, never mocking the individual. But He is sharp and sarcastic in His derision of those institutions such as Pharisaism, which posture in their self-made self-importance. Wisdom

Wisdom never promises that you will be without enemies, but it does enable you to live at peace with them. Those who heed wisdom's voice will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.241 This is part of wisdom's favor, for when a man's ways please the Lord, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.242 Wisdom

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.

What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

John Crowley

A secret is not a thing you're not supposed to tell; it is a thing that can't be told.

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?" "Everybody always wonders that. I don't think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that." She took a black man of Alice's. "What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat: if you don't get it, shut up or go figure.

High on the hilltop The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. —Allingham, The Fairies

Well, you know, it's probably not the first time it ever happened in the world," she said.

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

What makes us happy makes us wise

What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.' Oscar Wilde53

Marital life cannot be easily represented in art because it is the small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where outwardly nothing happens. Romantic love is like a general who knows how to conquer but not how to govern once the last shot is fired. Unlike the aesthete, who knows how to 'kill time' , married people master time without killing it. Marital time is about the wise use and governance of time, setting one's hands to the plough of the day-to-day.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

Nietzsche had it right when he said we lack the courage for the truth, that the truth will make us stronger just so long as it doesn't kill us first.