Quotes About Wisdom

Philosophy is just a hobby. You can't open a philosophy factory.

Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives...

To live alone, one must be a beast or a god — says Aristotle — leaving out the third case: that one must be both — a philosopher.

Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn't know you needed transforming.

Poetry staggers, drunken but wise, amongst the stars. Philosophy plots its own steady course to the sun.

And let me be rather but honest with no-wit, Than a noisy nonsensical half-witted poet.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge...

If it is a wild tune, it is a poem... Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of the poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.

Conservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.

The principle is that the qualities that get a man into power are not those that lead him, once established, to use power wisely. There is a simple democratic theory that the best man gets the office. In American thinking this is badly mixed up with the idea that some men "deserve" office, as if the right to control other men, to blast or benefit the future, were something that should be paid over as a reward for achievement in other fields or for virtue.

The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs.

Fortune Cookies. — Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

You know you are getting old when it takes too much effort to procrastinate.

A promise is a comfort for a fool.

...yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points.

A proverb is much light condensed in one flash.

What flowers are to gardens, spices to food, gems to a garment, and stars to heaven; such are proverbs interwoven in speech.

A proverb is to speech what salt is to food.

Proverbs are the literature of reason.

Proverbs are the lamps to words.

Proverbs bear age and he who should do well may view himself in them as in a looking-glass.

The common sayings of the multitude are too true to be laughed at.

A man's life is often builded on a proverb.

A proverb is an ornament to language.