Quotes About Wisdom

In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammed was 'Read.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.

Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, 'and make sure that the Church never finds out.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

I would rather have regrets of excess than regrets of denial.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

Don't mix your heart with your liver.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

It is always a mistake to argue with a librarian.

The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. ... Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

I asked my mother why we couldn't have books and she said, 'The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.' I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?

I have had a lot to put up with, she said, looking meaningfully at me. I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.

My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things that people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right.

Why do humans need answers? Partly I suppose because without one, almost any one, the question itself soon sounds silly.

It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day. You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens. Then what happens? You won't be able to find the treasure. Will I be too old to look for it? No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old.