Quotes About Wisdom

Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world.

Experience is the extract of suffering.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

Our knowledge of human nature is for the most part empirical; and it would often be better, if, instead of endeavouring to say some new things ourselves, we were to confirm without more words the sayings of another.

The problem was, Albert never made that lack of conflict explicit. For all his staggering erudition, he was never tempted to join up the two great existing systems of wisdom in the Western world: the school of Aristotle and Greek science and that of Plato and his Christian disciples, including Saint Augustine. That was the task Aquinas decided to undertake once he received his license to teach at the University of Paris in 1256.

a single ideal of perfection, which is impossible to know through our senses, but is knowable through the soul of reason. If we can concentrate our minds instead on that higher standard, or what Socrates calls the Idea or Form of that virtue, defined as Courage or Beauty or Justice in Itself—or even Goodness, which is the highest Form of all, setting the standard of perfection for all the rest—then true wisdom will be ours.

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

God is always doing geometry. —Saying attributed to Plato

Dionysius II had every gift except good sense; he was also an incurable alcoholic. He soon lost patience with his two would-be political tutors and threw them out.

Common sense tells us that we can understand and navigate our way through that reality, and common sense tells us that the more we know about that outside world, the better we can act on it, both as individuals and as members of a community.

Du Bois brought back a phrase he had coined in 1922, "Africa for Africans": "Hereafter it will no longer be ruled by might nor by power, by invading armies nor police, but by the spirit of all its gods and the wisdom of its prophets."76

To Clement and his generation, Christianity was not the enemy of philosophy, but its finest and last expression.

The wisdom Socrates had brought to the Greeks, Clement asserted, Jesus had brought to the Jews and other barbarians. In fact, Socrates and Jesus were spiritual brothers. Just as Plato and Aristotle founded schools to teach disciples, so now Christ was the new "schoolmaster" of the human race.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" One of Augustine's fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize.

The philosophy of the ancients and the Stoics had reserved final wisdom for a chosen few. Christianity delivered those same truths, and the moral virtues that went with them, to the many, right down to slaves and the homeless. Plato was like a chef at a five-star restaurant, Origen said, who only knew recipes that appealed to his handful of wealthy diners. Jesus, by contrast, Origen says, "cooks for the multitudes"—and the multitudes have responded.41

What was the secret of the Jews' strength and virtue? Origen offered the answer. First of all, their Scripture with its power to transform multitudes, "making the coward the hero, and the wicked good." Then there was their faith: a faith more powerful than human reason alone, because it was based on still higher wisdom, the wisdom of God.

The example of Saint Socrates, as Erasmus once called him, would gently lead everyone to see that the soul's highest goal is wisdom and that the "philosophy of Christ" (philosophia Christi) is the highest form of wisdom there is.

And since all knowledge forms a whole, the corollary is never throw anything away. Every doctrine, no matter how esoteric or seemingly irrational or irrelevant, may hold yet another secret to understanding the rest.

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, "All things change" (Panta rhei) and "You cannot step into the same river twice," make him the father of relativism:

When the Ostrogoths had swept into Italy, Theodoric looked for the best and brightest Roman for advice on how to govern. He turned to Boethius. For nearly two decades, Boethius had acted as Theodoric's chief political adviser and mentor—his surrogate father, almost. Theodoric was dazzled by Boethius's shrewd advice, by his icy calm in times of crisis, but above all by his knowledge of Greek literature, philosophy, and science.

Socrates could do this because he starts with a different question from "What is real?" (although eventually he gets there, too). Socrates was the first also to ask: "What am I?

Boethius was deeply aware of the practical, humanistic side of Plato's thought in dialogues like the Republic, the Gorgias, and the Crito. He embraced Plato's belief that men need wisdom in order to confront and deal with evil in this world, as well as to prepare for the next. The proof is the reverence with which he invokes the name of Socrates.

a mind broadened by rigorous understanding of theory, but also steeped in the nuances of actual practice.