Quotes About Wisdom

We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn't. Success often lies just the other side of failure.

Perfect love is rare indeed - for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.

Live,love and learn

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

Those who think they know it all have no way of finding out they don't..

He liked to recall a statement the seventeenth-century diplomat William Temple made in retirement, that the gratifications of the public world are as nothing compared with "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.

Instinct is a makeshift, an admission of helplessness before the problem of reality.

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.

The old man… used to say that a nap "after dinner was silver—before dinner, golden."

Busy thyself with the secrets of wisdom and knowledge, thus thou shalt overcome the fear of the morrow in thee.

Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.

Most men do not mature, they simply grow taller.

A young khokhem told his grandmother that he was going to become a doctor of philosophy. The bubbe smiled proudly: "Wonderful. But what kind of disease is 'philosophy'?

Which is more important: money or wisdom? "Wisdom," says the philosopher. "Ha!" scoffs the cynic. "If wisdom is more important than money, why is it that the wise wait on the rich, and not the rich on the wise?" "Because," says the scholar, "the wise, being wise, understand the value of money; but the rich, being only rich, do not know the value of wisdom.

FOLK SAYINGS: "Nine wise men don't make a minyan, but ten cobblers do." "Nine saints do not make a minyan, but one ordinary man can by joining them.

The rabbi of Chelm visited the prison, and there he heard all but one of the inmates insist on their innocence. So he came back, held a council of wise men, and recommended that Chelm have two prisons: one for the guilty and another for the innocent.

FOLK SAYING: "Better to be in Gehenna with a wise man than in Gan Eden [Paradise] with a fool.

PROVERB: "A wise man, looking for a bride, should take an ignoramus along to advise him.

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.

There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.