Quotes About Wisdom

Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Les contre-façons du passé prennent de faux noms et s'appellent volontiers l'avenir. Ce revenant, le passé, est sujet à falsifier son passe-port. Mettons-nous au fait du piège. Défions-nous. Le passé a un visage, la superstition, et un masque, l'hypocrisie. Dénonçons le visage et arrachons le masque.

If we ever feel the need to follow something, let it be our own Divine intuition.

The soul of a young girl should not be left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively are formed there, as in a dark chamber.

Tempus edax homo edacior; which I willingly thus translate; Time is blind, man is stupid.

A flower should smell sweet, and a woman should have wit.

Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends. In

Oh, you who are! Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence; Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all your names.

God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes less steep.

many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.

The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.

With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.

Always and everywhere people are to be found who have seen everything.

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought

L'amour, c'est la bêtise de l'homme et l'esprit de Dieu.

To learn to read is to light a fire;

The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought

Disminuir el número de los tenebrosos, aumentar el de los luminosos; tal es el grande objeto. Por esto gritamos: ¡Enseñanza! ¡Ciencia! Aprender a leer es encender el fuego; toda sílaba deletreada brilla. Pero el que dice luz, no dice necesariamente goces. También se padece en la luz, porque el exceso quema. La llama es enemiga de las alas. Arder sin cesar de volar es el prodigio del genio.

Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age. During this journey in 1825

A priest and a philosopher are two different things

Se ignora lo que se debe saber, y se sabe lo que se debería ignorar.

There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson.

Cuando le ocurría alguna vez, porque, ¿a quién no le ocurre? Decir: -¡Oh. si fuese rico!- no lo decía nunca echando el lente a una joven bonita, como el señor Guillenormand, sino contemplando un libro.