Quotes About Wisdom

It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

A burnt child loves the fire.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

I'm too old to know everything

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

What is done is done. What is past is past. You call yesterday the past? What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.

When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life, now that I'm old - I know it is!