Quotes About Wisdom

never get into a pissing match with folks who buy ink by the barrel

Do you know that when a man becomes old, he begins to remember what he believed in as a child and it all comes back to him?

I don't see why being smart and grown up has anything to do with abandoning the things you believed in when you were a kid.

Advice saves you time. If you ask anyone over fifty, which is more important, time or money, they will ALWAYS tell you time.

Inspiration is a tool and a trap. If you're going to be inspired by anyone, be inspired by people who have been exactly where you are now.

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They're an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

Always keep your mouth shut with a drunk. You can never win with piss tanks. The most you can hope for is to break even.

He knew that the fuel his brain craved could only be found in a proper university.

Ray, don't get mad just because I say yes to life. I like to keep myself available to the universe, because it brings me wisdom. Maybe you don't just want me to soar.

Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance—after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy—you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.

I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

quotation from Einstein: 'The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.' I would suggest to Dr. Chauncy that in combination, the two qualities are even more alarming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's quotation: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function?

sometimes not knowing can be a lot worse than knowing—even if knowing proves to be very painful.

He had reached an age where he found the best way to deal with unpleasantness was to pretend it didn't exist.

What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? "How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.

there was no reason why having a high iq would somehow protect you from the vicissitudes of life

When all else has been discarded, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.