Quotes About Wisdom

Do not plunge thyself too far in anger.

Anger without power is folly.

When you are angry, you make bad decisions in direct proportion to the level of your anger.

Take heed of the Vinegar of sweet Wine, and the Anger of Good-nature.

Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.

Do not allow your anger to control your reason, but rather your reason to control your anger.

To make decisions while infuriated is as unwise and foolish as it is for a captain to put out to sea in a raging storm.

Getting even with somebody is no way to get ahead of anybody.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.

Modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. Wendell Berry

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life.

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture—such as I was when I made my pond—is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as "understanding.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank.