Quotes About Wisdom

The thinkers and works of the past are studied here not as dated museum pieces or objects of antiquarian curiosity; they are confronted as powerful voices that challenge us to join in searching debates. The point is not to learn about these thinkers and texts, but from them.

the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits.

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

James was a rare philosopher in that he put no faith in logic. And he was doubtless wise to adopt that stance, since the fortunes of those who attempt to defend their opinions with logic are not enviable.

Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known

Of course, there's also the basic problem that some people just aren't very bright. And as we'll see, the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.

Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. This

None of us is a Da Vinci, painting the Mona Lisa in the morning and designing helicopters at night. That's as it should be. No, the bigger problem is that we're proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.

The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It's an old saying, but it's true: it ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you do know that ain't so.

Some educators even repeat the old saw that "I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!" (With due respect to my colleagues in the teaching profession who use this expression, I am compelled to say: if that's true, then you're not a very good teacher.) The

Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.

about Voltaire)...he was generally unbedeviled by any foolish consistency.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book.

Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

Ground not upon dreams you know they are ever contrary.