Quotes About Wisdom

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark; when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

Sri Yukteswar showed no special consideration to those who happened to be powerful or accomplished; neither did he slight others for their poverty or illiteracy. He would listen respectfully to words of truth from a child, and openly ignore a conceited pundit.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

I told him that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words.

To seek advice is easy, easy-approach job. To find the truth by yourself, that is a little difficult, and you have to work hard continuously, and you will find it.

I used to panic and get rattled when I was young, but as I've got older, I've started literally to live day to day. With age, you work out what matters.

We look at everything as live and learn. So if there was an experience that happened and certain things didn't work out, to us it's more important to look into why it didn't work out and make sure we don't repeat the errors of the past.

I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

I could live a thousand years and still not know everything, still not have tried anything.

A thousand years of uninterrupted British sovereignty has taught us one thing. If change isn't allowed to be a process, it becomes an event.

I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.

The Way is the beginning of the ten thousand things and the guiding thread of truth and falsity.

Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness.

Years ago a friend and fellow writer, Nick Antosca, once made a remark about it being best not to threaten, but to simply act. An effective way of going about things, I think.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.