Quotes About Wisdom

What keeps me going are my learnings, which I would rather call my 'experience,' and my urge to explore.

As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that's the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.

There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

The most urgent task of any college is the transmission of knowledge, pure and simple.

While conventional wisdom has traditionally sided against borrowing from retirement savings, sentiment has shifted toward borrowing from one's own assets with the realization that other forms of credit come at a much higher cost and often are not even available to borrowers with limited means and urgent needs.

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Every child growing up will look to their parents, my mother and my father. My grandmother lived with us. I picked up quite a bit of family lore and history from her, which was interesting.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

Those who tread among serpents, and along a tortuous path, must use the cunning of the serpent.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Fortunate indeed, is the man who takes exactly the right measure of himself, and holds a just balance between what he can acquire and what he can use.