Quotes About Wisdom

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

But I was the daughter of a Naiad. Behave like water, I told myself. Don't try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them.

She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.

My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I'm older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

So few people understand about anything.

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.

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

She'd learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb's view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own.

Torture is like dancing: I'm too old for it. Let the younger ones practice their bravery.

That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again.

She said, What you don't know won't hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don't know an hurt you very much.

Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.

Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it's smarter than you.

I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

We should not expect too much from faith," he said. "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.

He has something we don't have, he has the word.

We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.

How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?