Quotes About Wisdom

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.

When he graduated he'd thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero's journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn't how it worked.

By the standards of magical society they'd fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn't had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn't that always the best thing?

Free Trader Beowulf—you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.

Age is wasted on the young. Just like youth.

Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.

Historical seen, said Alice, people have almost always have whrong when they have said that.

If he couldn't go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.

Quentin did not consider himself a great interpreter of signs and wonders, but the lesson of the golden key seemed pretty clear to him. It was this: you've already won the game, so quit playing. Remain where you are, in your castle, and you will be safe. No further action on your part is required.

You deal with it, and you get on with your life. "Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

Theories about life were always bullshit.

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least half-way home

She was dying to look, but she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she'd know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn't it? To understand your own story? Reading the book now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheats at life?

Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.

Furthermore, as long as the world shall last, there will always be people who, either for the sake of peace or from an unquiet conscience, will build up sublime lies for their neighbours. And these people have always been and will always be the masters of human thought.

If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world.

Whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree.

If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates', whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.

I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being