Quotes About Wisdom

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it...

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

Let old ones go. Dont be a memory-monger! Once you were young??now you are even younger.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.

Worldly Wisdom Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.

Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it from me. I wish to spread it and bestow it, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.

Ultimately no one can hear in things?books included?more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives 'unphilosophically' and 'unwisely,' above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

Only ideas won by walking have any value.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp.

Dostoevsky,the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.