Quotes About Wisdom

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden—"Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it, speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead therefore we must learn both arts.

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity speech is shallow as Time.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.