Quotes About Wisdom

For statesmanship is a science and an art; one must have lived for it and been long prepared. Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation. Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership meet in the same man,... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race (473). This is the key-stone of the arch of Plato's thought.

to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of strength.

On his desk, when he died, there lay a paper on which he had written his last, and perhaps his most characteristic, sentences: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.

Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

We suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with science breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments of what a man might be.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

It is perhaps the best fruit of philosophy that through it we unlearn the lesson of endless acquisition which an industrial environment so insistently repeats. "Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted."69 A bit of wisdom is a joy forever.

Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus —"Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps

If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?

a man's maturity pays the price of his youth.

I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.

Life, says a fine Greek adage, is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.)

Magnanimity in politics," said Edmund Burke, "is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together

What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.

A bit of wisdom is a joy forever.

The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification.

An ancient critic spoke of him as "moderate to excess.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free. Some

Voltaire might say, "I have no scepter, but I have a pen.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Do you know," asks Emerson, "the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and In that I am his pupil.

Great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at least, of that which flowers out in them.

For statesmanship is a science and an art; one must have lived for it and been long prepared. Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation. "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership meet in the same man, . . . cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race" (473). This is the key-stone of the arch of Plato's thought.