Quotes About Wisdom

They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

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

Mat felt the change upon himself. Now he was the oldest, and the longest memory was his. Now between him and the grave stood no other man. From here on he would find the way for himself.

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. — Wendell Berry, from "How To Be a Poet," Given . (Counterpoint March 1, 2006) Originally published 2005.

I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to learn.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

Maybe some things aren't meant to be known. maybe there just meant to be accepted.

Sometimes the best things look the strangest.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows

We can never know anything.

Truth itself wanders through the forests.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

proof. It will come in its own time and in its own way. What I can do is describe how I have learned to use it

they want to join us and live in conscious contact with us. They need us, but more, we need them—their wisdom and their devastatingly accurate insight into the fragile truth of the world.

In the higher world, we don't live our lives, we wear them. And that's what it means to rise above life on the wings of objective love. That's where she was.

Her least favorite thing: VOLUNTARY IGNORANCE

You're too old for this type of living,' he told

Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is a hasty heart," he said softly.

Sometimes you are garrulous, Taita.' Pharaoh was less than captivated by my lecture on the palace architecture. 'Get on