Quotes About Wisdom

About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

Always ask the turtle.

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

We learn most where we know the least.

YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —Native Elders

According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What

It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

The things you regret sometimes turn out to be the things you celebrate. In other words: You learn from what you do wrong.

I also thought suddenly of the wisdom of my speaking partner, the late generous, outrageous, matchless Flo Kennedy. She found value in conflict, no matter what. "The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason," she often explained. "It's to keep your ass sensitive. " Remembering her words made me laugh out loud.

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it.

I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.

In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: "Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.

the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary

the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy

We learn where we know the least.

In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning—and more will.

The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me.

read Plato or Shakespeare or Dante as if we found their books in the street and had no idea who they were. I

there is no better moment in life than finding the right word.

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row").