Quotes About Wisdom

and that's when it hit me: It's all a joke. With the possible exception of geometry, which has too many sharp edges, and health classes, which make you sick, it's all a joke. All of it. At least now. But I've only felt that way for a short time, so I might be wrong.

Sometimes it is good to think of old things, old ways, and do the old stories when there is nothing to do but wait.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be, to books.

The biggest advances are not made by being a great teacher; they are made by being a great student.

I need to bring my illusions to the truth instead of giving truth to my illusions.

People are always looking for God to answer their prayers. If they knew more about how to pray then they'd know how the answer is given. His answers don't come in the form of physical answers, they come to your mind in the form of guidance — an inspired idea

Let J or the Holy Spirit make your decisions for you whenever you have the time to ask.

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

He worried that when he would speak of the past, he would sound and look old, as all ancient storytelling men did.

In carpentry, they say, "Measure twice, cut once." With data, "Think twice, calculate once.

When men see Han-shan They all say he's crazy And not much to look at - Dressed in rags and hides. They don't get what I say And I don't talk their language. All I can say to those I meet: Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

I wanted a good place to settle: Cold Mountain would be safe. Light wind in a hidden pine - Listen close - the sound gets better. Under it a gray haired man Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao. For ten years I havn't gone back home I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

WE SHALL SEE WHO KNOWS HOW TO BE

There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.

If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete.

One can almost apply Gabriel Marcel's famous insight: life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.

In Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, we read: An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon. Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.

To sum up, while we do not seek to instruct the reader, we should feel rewarded for our efforts if we can persuade him to practice an exercise at which we are a master: to laugh at oneself. No progress is possible in the acquisition of objective knowledge without this self-critical irony.

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

To speak well is part of living well.

The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories