Quotes About Wisdom

Whether religion be true or false, it must be necessarily granted to be the only wise principle and safe hypothesis for a man to live and die by.

The care of a wise and good man for his only son is inferior to the regard of the great Parent of the universe for his creatures.

There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion.

Cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon weak men in the same manner as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom.

Experience makes more timid men than it does wise ones.

A good reliable set of bowels is worth more to a man than any quantity of brains.

The man who gets bit twice by the same dog is better adapted for that kind of business than any other.

It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.

'Without the help of mathematics,' the wise man continued, 'the art could not advance and all the sciences would perish.'

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.

The clever men of Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed but they none of them know one half as much as intelligent Mr. Toad.

The wise man puts himself last and finds himself first.

A foolish man is always doing, Yet much remains to be done.

A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost

Man is ruled by Earth. Earth is ruled by Heaven. Heaven is ruled by the Way. The Way is ruled by itself.

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

Greed makes man blind and foolish, and makes him an easy prey for death.

Babies haven't any hair; Old men's heads are just as bare; between the cradle and the grave lie a haircut and a shave.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had

The highest culture is not obtained from the teacher when at school or college, so much as by our ever diligent self-education when we become men.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.