Quotes About Wisdom

Indian activist, Mahatma Gandhi, who was a leader and guru, had a HUNGER for peace and justice. One of his sayings was, "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

The more a man learns, Dickens said, "the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time…he will become more tolerant of other men's belief in all matters

The wise man waits and his enemies tear each other to pieces

Remember: a clever woman never lets a man know how cleaver she is

Machiavelli himself famously put it: "All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief."9

Gemini....You revere scientists and shamans alike, providing them with what they need to do their good work for the enhancement of the realm." (Rob Brezsny)

But there are times, I would argue, when fiction delivers the greater truth.

wishing I could do everything in my life once as practice, and then go back and do it again.

But if theory is not the crystallized resin of experience, it ceases to be a guide to action.

I could see the sadness in Jan's smile. "You've been through a lot. There's some age you can't count by years. You know how they cut a slice from a tree and count the rings? You got a lot of rings inside that trunk of yours. You know what? I think it's time I stopped calling you kid. You stopped being a kid a long time ago.

You were showing him your muscle?" I froze, wondering how much she had seen. She smiled. "Sometimes it's better to let boys think they're stronger," she told me.

Back then I'd told her, over and over, not to judge people by the way they looked. Or where they lived. Or by their horse or their buggy or their barn. But those days when I held such influence were long gone.

Worry is refusing the given. Today's care, not tomorrow's, is the responsibility given to us, apportioned in the wisdom of God. Often we neglect the thing assigned for the moment because we are preoccupied with something that is not our business just now. How easy it is to give only half our attention to someone who needs us—friend, husband, or little child—because the other half is focused on a future worry.[14]

Worry is refusing the given. Today's care, not tomorrow's, is the responsibility given to us, apportioned in the wisdom of God. Often we neglect the thing assigned for the moment because we are preoccupied with something that is not our business just now. How easy it is to give only half our attention to someone who needs us—friend, husband, or little child—because the other half is focused on a future worry.[14] Whenever you are tempted to dwell on fearful

Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don't have the stories, you don't have anything.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.

Are you old enough to be young again?

Past all the silliness of youth -- with its insecurities, cheap thrills, and ill-fitting identities -- lies the snug comfort of age.

Truth has nutritional value.

Many of us, like Sandra, are under the impression "that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different, namely, that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting."5 Choosing to act right when you don't feel like it isn't hypocrisy; it's obedience.

Satan's goal is to tweak a lie so cleverly that it sounds reasonable, truthful, even right. Eve

Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.

I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.