Quotes About Wisdom

there is no one on earth as dangerous as a really clever fool.

wisdom of the outdoors, until

but often it is best to plead ignorance. That way you are more likely to learn secrets that might otherwise have been denied you.

Paradox is a characteristic of truth.

There's a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.

Nothing in the world is hidden forever.

?nsan?n yapabilece?i itiraflar?n en ac?kl?s?, kendi sersemli?inin itiraf?ndan ba?kas? de?ildir.

I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.

Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it. Only

So do extremes meet; and such is sometimes the all-embracing capacity of the approval of a fool!

The cleverest people commit occasional lapses into stupidity—just as the stupid people light up with gleams of intelligence at certain times. You may have shown your usual good sense in conducting your affairs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the week. But it doesn't at all follow from this, that you may not make a fool of yourself on Thursday.

There's a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.

Many men, many opinions, as one of the ancients said, before my time.

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait!—"If youth knew how, and old age could!

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

In books we converse with the wise, as in action with fools. That is, if we know how to select our books. Some books are to be tasted, reads a famous passage, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.