Quotes About Wisdom

The first rule is never to split your forces unless it is necessary to survival. The second rule is to attack if you are going to fight, and if you are not going to attack, avoid battle. The third rule is to choose the time and place of battle and never leave that choice to the enemy. The fourth rule is to avoid encirclement at all cost. And the final rule is to attack and destroy the enemy where he is weakest.

You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age?" "I am as old as I can be at my age. I don't know very much, but I know the water.

The mark of spiritual maturity is not how much you understand, but how much you use. In the spiritual realm, the opposite of ignorance is not knowledge but obedience.

One of the great killers in Bible study is the statement, "I already know that.

They reflect common sense or—as my mentor Nelson Goodman used to quip—common nonsense.

There is a limit to the development of the intellect but none of that of the heart

Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving.

But you don't always have to ask to know.

He who trains his tongue to quote the learned sages will be known, far and wide, as a smart-ass.

To avoid confusion, let me make an important distinction: Practically all philosophers these days are fallibilists. That is, they recognize that even our best-supported theories and factual claims are fallible and may turn out to be wrong—as, indeed, they so often have in the past. But fallibilism does not entail relativism

As I have heard it put, a critical thinker is good at distinguishing gold from bullshit

An accurate opinion on valuation, loosely held, will be of limited help. An incorrect opinion on valuation, strongly held, is far worse. This one statement shows how hard it is to get it all right

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

What good is intelligence,' Akutagawa asked, 'if you can't ever discover a useful melancholy?

It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

When you're in a hole, quit digging!

Her tecrübe sizi bir sonrakine haz?rlar. Bir sonrakinin ne olaca??n? hiç bilemezsiniz.

Skepticism has come to be synonymous with sophistication, and glibness is mistaken for intelligence.

To see my world not as it was, but as it could be. This became a lifetime habit. And in some ways, that's the story I've tried to tell in this book: how we can all reimagine a better future by learning from the past with as much clarity and wisdom as we can muster, and by summoning the will and doing the work to bring that future into being. This has been my life's journey.

The important thing you need to learn is to stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Failing to use our life opportunities wisely and lovingly is a rejection of God.