Quotes About Wisdom

Beware of dreams," Elizabeth Finch replied. "Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

When I tell people that she was the most grown-up person I have known, I suppose what I mean is that there were principles very close behind, if not actually embedded in, all her actions and thoughts.

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.

Know thy enemy… even thy dead enemy, for he may easily resuscitate.

But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

La verdad no es amable. Lo descubrirás muy pronto cuando la vida te vapulee.

Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed – he was eighty-two at the time – that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.

And so, wisely no doubt, I left philosophy to my brother, and returned to literature, which did, and still does, tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how best to live in that world, thought it does so most effectively when appearing not to do so.

Ljudi kažu da je život prava stvar ali ja više volim ?itanje.

Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: "If you lower your expectations, you can't be disappointed." This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?

de todo ello: «Más vale malograr la ancianidad que no saber qué hacer con ella.»

Ipak, ništa tako ne može da natera ljude da pametno misle kao dobra katastrofa.

The more you learn, the less you fear. 'Learn' not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

I don't envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction.

Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .

Why go through that stuff all over again? Don't you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own … what? Conventionality, lack of imagination

Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of—what shall I call it? the age of her spirit, perhaps—we aren't that far apart.

But I was wrong about most things, then as now.

Why did people imagine that progress consisted of believing in less, rather than believing in more, in opening yourself to more of the universe?

The more you learn, the less you fear.