Quotes About Wisdom

Have you summoned your wits from woolgathering?

By my faith the fool has feathered his nest well.

FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.

Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements, And should give certain judgement what they see; But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders Of common things, which when our judgments find, They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.

Humility, that low, sweet root, From which all heavenly virtues shoot.

My only booksWere woman's looks,And folly's all they've taught me.

Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed... To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life... One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

It is a wise mans part, rather to avoid sickness, than to wishe for medicines.

Because here was what none of them wanted to admit, Leo thought, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be.

Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?

Didn't laugh as loud or as often. Smith, too, had seen more

Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality.

Grosse plodders they were all, that had some learning and reading, but no wit to make use of it.

Minutes are worth more than money. Spend them wisely.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances… that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: once dispelled, it is impossible to re-establish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.

Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.

The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.