Quotes About Wisdom

Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.

There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest

When you combine the judgments of a large group of people to calculate the "wisdom of the crowd" you collect all the relevant information that is dispersed among all those people. But none of those people has access to all that information. One person knows only some of it, another knows some more, and so on.

This approach, built on the "wisdom of the crowd" concept, has been called "the crowd within." The billionaire financier George Soros exemplifies it. A key part of his success, he has often said, is his mental habit of stepping back from himself so he can judge his own thinking and offer a different perspective—to himself.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.

Knowledge is something we can all increase, but only slowly. People who haven't stayed mentally active have little hope of catching up to lifelong learners.

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

A forecaster who doesn't adjust her views in light of new information won't capture the value of that information, while a forecaster who is so impressed by the new information that he bases his forecast entirely on it will lose the value of the old information that underpinned his prior forecast. But the forecaster who carefully balances old and new captures the value in both—and puts it into her new forecast. The best way to do that is by updating often but bit by bit.

tip-of-your-nose delusions can fool anyone, even the best and the brightest—perhaps especially the best and the brightest.

What qualifies as a good question? It's one that gets us thinking about something worth thinking about. So one way to identify a good question is what I call the smack-the-forehead test: when you read the question after time has passed, you smack your forehead and say, "If only I had thought of that before!

Popular books often draw a dichotomy between intuition and analysis—"blink" versus "think"—and pick one or the other as the way to go. I am more of a thinker than a blinker, but blink-think is another false dichotomy. The choice isn't either/or, it is how to blend them in evolving situations.

It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by—and now named for—James Surowiecki's bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton's weight-guessers.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

What make the difference is correctly identifying and responding to subtler information so you zero in on the eventual outcome faster than others.

We mortals can be fools, especially when mortal emotions rule over cool reason.

Emerson used India to formulate his philosophy, and India used Emerson to legitimize its ancient wisdom to the modern mind.

God is not intimidated by such hard and testing questions, nor is he unable to answer them. But we must come with the right kind of skepticism—not the kind that refuses to believe anything at all, but the kind that is committed to believe only what is really true.

Alfred the Great] possessed the supreme military virtue of willingness to be taught by the enemy.

I don't want to spend this last half [of life] trying to recapture the first. I want to stretch and grow and do bold things ... and question what I've been taught and generally alarm people with my broadmindedness.

Life, not lectures, inspires us to change.

God is love. When people claim to speak for God, there should be love in their words.

some lesssons couldn't be taught, only learned.

Not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease.