Quotes About Wisdom

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - from Live Without Principle

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

Make the most of your regrets. . . . To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.