Quotes About Wisdom

It's hard not to empathize with the mayor's anger, given the injustices he'd suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

As an instrument for practical action, law is responsive to the wisdom of its time, which may be wrong, but it carries forward, sometimes in opposition to this wisdom or passion, a memory of received values.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history. FRIEDRICH HEGEL

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage." ~Samuel Johnson

FOLLOW YOUR HEART for your heart will always know the answer. but if it tells you to strangle kittens or something then DON'T follow it anymore.I mean it's just a heart, right? It's not the Dalai lama.

For just a little while, in all our lives, we're granted brief glimpses at the way things really operate. In those times, we learn the hardest lessons. To coin a few phrases, there are none so blind as those who will not see... and sometimes, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.

For each of us, life is a story. There are characters, conflicts, plot developments, crises, interludes, twists and resolutions. Sometimes the story makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. But there's still value in the story itself, even when you can't add up the parts and understand the whole. A good story can lead you toward insight perhaps wisdom, regardless of whether or not you fully understand it. Maybe that's why storytelling has always been so important to me.

When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.

This phenomenon has been called the wisdom of crowds. But like most simplifications, this has a flip side, as in the Madoff case. Here there were just two answers, fraudster or investment genius. The crowd voted for investment genius and got it wrong. I call the flip side to the wisdom of crowds the lunacy of lemmings.

As Keynes said, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

the philosopher George Santayana famously warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Though the institutions of society have difficulty learning from history, individuals can do so.

When the great theologian and philosopher Rabbi Hillel was challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, he replied, "Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.

Obviously no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false, or at least questionable in details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.

religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.

A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man, if you will pardon me, stops learning at fourteen or so. He shuts it all down, Mr. Robbins. A log is capable of learning more than a man. To teach a man would be a battle, a war, and I would lose.

He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven's back door.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you're any wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.