Quotes About Wisdom

In this very breath that we now take Lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.

The wants of the primitive are few, since he does not envy what he knows nothing of.

A diplomat, according to Alex Dreier, is "anyone who thinks twice before saying nothing.

Some of what we learned early on turned out to be true (the earth is round; if you want a friend be a friend; cleanliness is next to impossible) and some of it turned out to be false (Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; Kansas is more fun than Oz).

As Steve has said to me on more than one occasion: "The Chinese are the most rational people in the world. Until they aren't.

YOUTH is indeed wasted on the Young and Adventurous.

As Winston Churchill once said, "The Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

but the easiest way isn't necessarily the true one.

Traditional police wisdom has it that if a case doesn't yield leads in the first twenty-four hours, then everyone is in for a long, tough haul.

Well, it certainly seems that mankind learns nothing from history, so why should individuals learn anything from their own experience?" "I'm no expert, but that sounds like spurious logic to me.

We have to be something more than the accumulation of things that happen to us, don't you think?

Peter Robinson

The best insights about problems to be addressed often come from the worm's-eye view.

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. "Oh, you'll get your heart broken," he says. "Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But

The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.

You're a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn 'em. Most people don't learn what you bein' taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that's what you been learnin'.

Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible.

Wise men contemplate the world," he thinks, "knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.

The Praise of Folly.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow. (Quoted by Josh Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)