Quotes About Wisdom

you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.

Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God

Ten years ago I might have been offended, Daniel said. Now, there's nothing I'll not believe.

Sometimes it was better to say nothing than to fill a void badly.

Of course, happy is a concept for fat Americans. Immigrants don't seem to care about happy very much. Healthy, wealthy and wise, yes, but happiness alone is something their children worry about, maybe.

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement: "It is as true as it ever was.

If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.

If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.

Ideas are good things to have even if they are old. Even to understand the most advanced theorics requires a lifetime of study. To keep the existing stock of ideas alive requires…all of this." And I waved my arm around at the concent spread out below us.

It is surprisingly easy—but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.

There is a saying, 'Turtles all the way down,' which I would not expect you to understand, but the point of it is that to speculate along these lines is idle

Punjab, the more certain he became that simple and obvious would defeat complicated and clever

Religion is not for simpletons.

Religion asks you to learn from the experience of others. Spirituality urges you to seek your own.

When you give your children knowledge, you are telling them what to think. That is, you are telling them what they are supposed to know, what you want them to understand is true. When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but, rather, how to get to their own truth.

Truth is created, not discover!

Past Data should not be the basis of Present Truth. Data from a prior time or experience should always and only be the basis for new questions. Always the treasure should be in the question, not in the answer.

Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience. So I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings. And so too, thoughts.

Jesus knew that if he gave people the help they asked for, rather than merely the help he wanted to give, that he was empowering them at the level at which they were ready to receive empowerment.

Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to ensure that you won't have to keep on doing it! This apparent contradiction is part of the Divine Dichotomy, which says that sometimes the only way to ultimately Be a thing—in this case, "peaceful"—may be, at first, to not be it!

In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.

Intuition is the ear of the soul.

If you are in a group whose consciousness does not reflect your own, and you are unable at this time to effectively alter the group consciousness, it is wise to leave the group, or the group could lead you. It will go where it wants to go, regardless of where you want to go.