Quotes About Wisdom

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books? I shall only engage in commerce if books are the coin.

As you swallow the cow's tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man.

September frowned; she probably did need to hear things which were cruel but true. If they were true it did not matter if they were cruel, even if all her mistakes were laid out before her like rings in a jeweler's box.

She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.

Flowers are always more serious than they appear.

The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. "Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.

I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.

What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?" sleeve asked primly. The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: "It is right and proper," he said, "for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.

I savor bitterness — it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.

Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them.

As ever, you are wiser than I, you old genie. May the Stars grant that you are always here to look after me." "Are you taking up religion in your old age, then, Captain?" "Hardly. Habit, my love, habit.

no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals.

I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls. . . . How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count—the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment.

The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: "It is right and proper," he said, "for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.

Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough.

But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping.

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it's already done getting ruined all over you.

Most people don't like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple.

Orpheus asks his mother. She tells him the obvious: the entrance to hell is always in your own house, silly billy.

The dead know how to savor as the living never can.

September suddenly realized something. "But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?" The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying. "I'm growing up!" he cried.

A clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.