Quotes About Wisdom

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

We understand more than we know.

There is no fool like an educated fool...

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Now that I am dead, I know everything.

Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

the difference between stupid and ignorant was that ignorant could learn.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know can hurt you very much.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between.

I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

Not real can tell us about real.

How can I teach her some way of being human that won't destroy her I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin. I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone's voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I wish I was ignorant, so I didn't know how ignorant I am

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.

It's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.