Quotes About Wisdom

What you're looking for is already inside you..You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security.

If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, "You wouldn't understand.

For some of us books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small flat rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world worlds that sing to you comfort and quiet or excite you." — Anne Lamott

Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.

We contain all the ages we have ever been.

Thurber was right when he said, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole.

You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, 'Not for me, baby.

People like to say that we cannot forgive others until we forgive ourselves. Isn't that nice? People like to say all sorts of stupid bumper-sticker things that aren't true and that in fact can be shaming...

As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, "Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on." I

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they're enough.

It's all here, everything we seek and need, inside us.

Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along. Without the package, another sort of beauty shines through.

Soon I got lost in a good way, with a book, which is also to get found, and my staunchest lifelong light.

Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn't control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people.

T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.' We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.