Quotes About Wisdom

What you don't know won't hurt you.

Yesterday I went to the doctor, to see about these dizzy spells. He told me that I have developed what used to be called a heart, as if healthy people didn't have one. It seems I will not after all keep on living forever, merely getting smaller and greyer and dustier, like Sibyl in her bottle. Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realise that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind.

Only fools, he said, were given to bragging about how much they could drink.

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.

She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe.

Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.

Siempre es una imprudencia interponerse entre un hombre y el reflejo de su propia inteligencia

After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others.

If in doubt, play dumb," said Ada

Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.

Melanie laughed and said, "No he isn't." I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

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?

I wonder if I should let my hair go grey so my advice will be better.

I didn't let on I knew. It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising 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.

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - Estienne; C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur - Montaigne; (...) L'histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse - de Maupassant.

discretion is the better part of valour

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

Ah the Eternal Stupid Woman! How we enjoy hearing about her: as she listens to the con-artist yarns of the plausible snake, and ends up eating the free sample of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge: thus giving birth to Theology; or as she opens the tricky gift box containing all human evils, but is stupid enough to believe that Hope will be some kind of a solace.

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

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

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

You'll learn about all of that when you're old enough," Aunt Vidala would say. All of that: the Handmaids were part of all of that. Something bad, then; something damaging, or something damaged, which might be the same thing.

what is is, as Grandma Win used to say, and what can't be cured must be endured, and laugh and the world laughs with you but cry and you cry alone.