Quotes About Wisdom

A body of work may be reviled -- mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings -- and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.

Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.

The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

It's the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that is more important than the actual answer.

Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.

But one should not trust first impulses. Instinct is not always a safe counsellor by any means.

Speran?a este un sfetnic prost.

For a large part of what I know about people and things I have to thank an art of listening which wise teachers taught me early.

My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

Come! our world is done: For all the witchery of the world is fled, And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.

The secret is that there is no secret.

Beware of what "everybody says".

Is it called naiveté when you're naïve in purpose?

Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.

The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn't mean it's fake.

Por qué haces todo lo posible para que tus hijas se sientan unas tontas? —¡No es eso! Sólo intento que se sientan incultas, que no es lo mismo.

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain...

the only good things about getting old was mutual permission to be imperfect.

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.