Quotes About Wisdom

If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

If you wish success in life, make perseverance you bosom friend, experience your wise councellor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

It is one thing to talk to entertain, Xavier, he told me. But it is a more powerful menewawin, a more powerful gift, to talk in order to teach. If you become a good teacher, you are on your way to healing some of the things that have gone wrong.

There are far more a worst crimes than burning books.... Not reading them.

If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals.

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

Don't think of what's being said, but of what's talking. Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?   The goal of the hero's journey is yourself, finding yourself.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. "To hell with it," he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.