Quotes About Wisdom

We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.

Vanity, not love, has been my folly.

My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! Just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die.

We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.

I would much rather have been merry than wise.

Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.

Sense will always have attractions for me.

The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.

The less said the better.

Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret.

How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.

There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal...

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.

Sono poche le persone che io amo per davvero e ancora meno quelle delle quali io penso bene. Più conosco il mondo, più ne sono disgustata; e ogni giorno conferma la mia convinzione dell'incoerenza del carattere umano, e della poca fiducia che possiamo riporre in tutto ciò che può apparire merito o intelligenza.

None but a woman can teach the science of herself.

We must live and learn.

He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before…

To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed.

An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.

one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half…

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.