Quotes About Wisdom

She believed in second chances, sometimes more than first chances, which were wasted on youth and indiscretion

You were right," Eve spoke through numb lips. "I should have stayed away.

One of the early reasons for Atherton's devotion to Slider had been that Slider had never, from the first meeting, looked at him askance. Slider had his countryman father's view that God had made all creatures different for His own purposes. A horse was not a cat and a cat was not a dog, and only a fool would want them to be.

You can't take away knowledge, and it's dangerous to pretend you never had it.

It is true that William Blake said that "The Road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom," but they didn't have angel dust back then.

Sometimes understanding comes in little drops and other times it rushes in like the tide, rolling everything over as it comes.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

Anyone who can relax, clear their mind, and envision being different in some way—such as more successful, funny, healthy, wealthy, or wise—can quantum jump. To initiate a quantum jump requires keeping an open mind that you can experience another reality. It is important that you are able to sincerely desire and feel a connection to another reality, envisioning some way of making a connection with it through a bridge, a door, a window or a handshake.

People can be unimaginably foolish...and they can be unimaginably grand, at times.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.

It is seldom that any judge really gets to the bottom of a case. The well of truth is usually too deep for the merely judicial plumb-line.

You know, sir," he said, "she was easily the nicest woman I ever knew." Sampson suppressed a smile. It was funny to hear a boy of seventeen talk like that. All the same, he reflected, the lad might live to seventy and still find no reason to change his opinion.

Obviously not," said Pettigrew, beginning to feel like a participant in one of Plato's dialogues when Socrates really got going.

I've known for a long time it's useless to try to share what you don't understand yourself.

Anger is the only thing to put off until tomorrow.

This I wanted and nothing more. In my old age like old Goethe to stand before the face of the earth, and recognize it and reconcile it with my work built up, a forest citadel on a river of changeable lights and brief shadows.

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he's 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

No one is exempt from talking nonsense the mistake is to do it solemnly.

Poverty of goods is easily cured poverty of the mind is irreparable.

I'm not as interested in dispensing knowledge on how to make a living ass I am in helping young people learn how to make a life...