Quotes About Wisdom

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.

Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.

Thus, love had taught her to decipher the mysteries of childhood.

Le tact dans l'audace, c'est de savoir jusqu'où on peut aller trop loin.

Her hands trembled as she pressed them together to make them stop, for Kapugen had taught her that fear can so cripple a person that he cannot think or act. Already she was too scared to crawl. Change your ways when fear seizes, he had said, for it usually means you are doing something wrong.

Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it: nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.

Beware, so long as you live, of judging men by their outward appearance.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.

Apprenez que tout flatteur Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute : Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute. Flatterers thrive on fools' credulity. The lesson's worth a cheese, don't you agree?

Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred.

Todos los cerebros del mundo son impotentes contra cualquier estupidez que esté de moda.

A foolish friend may cause more woe Than could, indeed, the wisest foe.

Never sell the bear's skin before one has killed the beast.

Just bring your wits. Sometimes that's the most effective weapon any of us has.

Sometimes things that seem like good ideas in theory, in practice turn out to be the worst kinds of boneheaded blunders.

There are only a few things worse than having to face up to the fact that the predicaments one finds oneself in are usually the results of one's own foolish actions.

I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.

On nous veut avec les stigmates des grandes écoles, je le veux avec les stigmates de la vie.

On comprenait que les hommes pourraient être aussi efficaces que Dieu dans d'autres domaines que la destruction.

She had learned not to expect love, and wasn't even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she'd managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother's presence. Fifteen down. One—please

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain than an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.