Quotes About Wisdom

The wider we read the freer we become.

En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness.

Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self.

The arts aren't a leisure industry - the arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality -a series of inventions and creations. A capacity to think differently, a willingness to change our understanding of ourselves. To help us be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about 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 where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Stop thinking, she said. The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat.

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.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving.

Ti do un consiglio: quando sei giovane e ti capita di leggere qualcosa che non ti piace affatto, mettilo da parte e rileggilo tra tre anni dopo. Se ancora non ti piace, rileggilo dopo altri tre anni. E quando sei giovane - quando arrivi ai cinquant'anni come me - rileggerai il libro che ti è piaciuto in assoluto di meno.

I libri sono per me una casa. I libri non fanno una casa, sono una casa, nel senso che, così come apri una porta, apri un libro e ci entri.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

But happiness is not a potato.

Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you it's my own body I touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. A skeleton key to Bluebeard's chamber. The bloody key that unlocks pain. Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

Some folk say I'm a fool, but there's more to this world than meets the eye.' I waited quietly. 'There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.

there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.

The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.

If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is attained without thought and even before the age of reason; because, moreover, learning is noticed only by its differences, and as in algebraic equations, common quantities count for nothing.

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.

Généralement, les gens qui savant peu parlent becoup, et les gens qui savant beaucoup parlent peu.

La jeunesse est le temps d'étudier la sagesse; la vieillesse est le temps de la pratiquer.

I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.