Quotes About Wisdom

Sanity is madness put to good uses.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.

[Self-]assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

Never assume that loud is strong and quiet is weak?

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Sanity is a madness put to good use.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.