Quotes About Wisdom

Books are keys that open many doors.

Biblical references about knowledge and good and evil often get tangled up.

Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.

My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:Don't never prophesy—onless ye know.

That best academy, a mother's knee.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

When I told my mother the extremes I went to in order to make a living, she just shook her head and said, "Now don't you wish you'd finished college, dear?" Mother's are so wise, sometimes.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing. Many a person can see a thing and believe a thing and know just as little about it as the person who does neither.

If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.