Quotes About Wisdom

She drove down from North Carolina to see me, and reminded me of scriptural lessons that tragedies and disappointments should be a source of increased patience, strength, wisdom, and a commitment to our Christian life. I rejected her premises at first, but Ruth finally convinced me to relegate my political and business ambitions to a secondary position of importance for a while and to assume some challenging religious commitments.

You have given me a great responsibility—to stay close to you, to be worthy of you, and to exemplify what you are. Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust. Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.

Regardless of how you feel, don't let your emotions lead you to wrong decisions

Don't Keep reaching for the stars because you'll just look like an idiot stretching that way for no reason

Viver - não é? - é muito perigoso. Porque ainda não se sabe. Porque aprender-a-viver é que é o viver, mesmo.

quando é que a velhice começa, surgindo de dentro da mocidade.

The maxim had often helped him, at any rate, and even saved him from making some wrong decisions, because he had rarely made a mistake when he had followed his own judgment alone. He put a piece of paper in front of each of us and dictated: "Etiam si omnes—ego non! It's from the Gospel According to St. Matthew

Time is the school in which we learn.  

the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

Time is the school in which we learn.

En épocas difíciles, me habían dicho desde niña, lee, aprende, prepárate, recurre a la literatura.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.

These protests have about them an engaging period optimism, depending as they do upon the Rousseauean premise that most people, left to their own devices, think not in cliches but with originality and brilliance; that most individual voices, once heard, turn out to be voices of beauty and wisdom.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz

We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes," Lionel Trilling once wrote. "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.")

I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word intellectual I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts.

Hero-ology, Spell-ology, Revenge-ology, Beast-ology, and Beautyology.

Within the first twenty years of our lives, before we are really adult, we make choices motivated by insecurity, fear, and other people's expectations; certinly not guided by clarity and wisdom. We plod along for years living with the wrong career or spousal choice, in a location we did not choose and perhaps do not like, and much more. One day we wake up restless and confused, and acknowledge that we have no agenda of our own, and that we have been living someone else's passion, their dream.

we live blindly. We repeat the same mistakes by rote until an emotional punch to the gut brings us up short. ...Sometimes it requires intense pain before we can take a good hard look at ourselves, before we ask the important questions. ... Who am I? What is important? What do I believe? What do I want?

They say an unexamined life is not worth living

What would you say you've taken away from all this? ... That running away solves nothing? That my desperate need for a man to fill my life, to make me feel whole, blinded me to what's important? ...

There was more to be said for the power of regret than was often said.

That was the way to start, he knew: with unsureness. Only when the mind cracked open its own worldly certainties could a glimpse of light appear.