Quotes About Wisdom

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

An education isnt how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. Its being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you dont. Its knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and its knowing how to use the information you get.

...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

In these pages the novelist should be able to find a striking verse to head his chapter, the raconteur add to his bon mots, the man of the world enrich his stock of maxims, the divine obtain some deep thought drawn from the wells of ancient learning.

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.

Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

Simplicity is never to be associated with weakness and ignorance. It means reducing tons of ore to nuggets of gold. It means the light of fullest knowledge; it means that the individual has seen the folly and the nothingness of those things that make up the sum of the life of others. He has lived down what others are blindly seeking to live up to.

Philosophy is for the few.

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth.... It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air.

I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.

You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school.

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

But there are certain disadvantages that may seem the necessary result of democratical equality. In political society it is reasonable to suppose that the wise will be outnumbered by the unwise, and it will be inferred 'that the welfare of the whole will therefore be at the mercy of ignorance and folly.

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

When I was your age, television was called books.

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

They who on meare curiositie (where no urgent necessitie requireth) try whether their children may not as birds be nourished without sucking, offend contrary to this dutie of breast feeding and reflect that meanes which God hath ordained as best; and so oppose their shallow wits to his unsearchable wisdom.