Quotes About Wisdom

If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not, in fact, his friends. How else would one learn to avoid saying those things that would elicit laughter from strangers? The mockery of friends is affectionate and inoculates against foolishness. ~Little Ozzie

The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

This isn't a stupid horror movie, odd one. It's never too late to do the intelligent thing.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility.… —T. S. Eliot, East Coker

The dead don't talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.

In my bones, I know that I am not long for this world.

Anyway, knowledge isn't wisdom, and we aren't here just to stuff ourselves with facts and figures. We are given this life so we might earn the next; the gift is a chance to grow in spirit, and knowledge is one of the many nutrients that facilitate our growth.

Grandpa Teddy often said, "In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.

When you realize you're fighting a fundamental law of the universe, it's best to surrender to nature.

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive.

Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.

To you of great faith, I am the product of your wisdom and the guarantor of your immortality.

Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

because the moon has always been to him the lamp of wisdom, a symbol of the right way to see the world.

But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain.

the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience...

If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas

But as usual, the common folk are wiser and more able to discern the truth of things than are the elites who claim to serve them.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine.

Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

I reminded myself that the heart is deceitful above all things.