Quotes About Wisdom

As Chuang Tzu put it: "In the deep dark the person alone sees light."87

be simple and always take the next step. You needn't see it in advance, but you can look back at it afterwards. There is no "how" of life, one just does it.... It seems, however, to be terribly difficult for you not to be complicated and to do what is simple and closest to hand.... So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose. That is your way. 1

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.15

one must experience and know."33

So the learning of complete people is to return their essential nature to non-being and float their minds in spaciousness.41

It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom—if there be such—it seems to be the right book.... Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.

Lao Tzu's wisdom: If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.111 He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work.112 Seeing into darkness is clarity. Knowing how to yield is strength. Use your own light and return to the source of light. This is called practicing eternity. 113

To see the smallest means to be clear. To guard wisdom means to be strong. If one uses one's light in order to return to this clarity one does not endanger one's person. This is called the hull of eternity.64

The] Tao [Self] Is simplicity, stillness, Indifference, purity. Here the highest knowledge Is unbounded.71

To let knowledge produce troubles, and then use knowledge to prepare against them, is like stirring water in hopes of making it clear.33

14 But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by continuous exercise to distinguish good from evil.

2 A fool takes no pleasure in trying to understand; he only wants to express his own opinion.

When I was at Oldsmobile," he said, "there was something I learned that I've never forgotten. There was an old guy there who was an engineer, and he had been at GM a long time, and he gave me some advice. He told me, whatever you do, don't let GM do it first." That was it, Davis thought later—the Detroit line, the symbol of the protected industry. Don't let GM do it first, let the other guy make the early, expensive mistakes.

true wisdom ... is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

Williams had a very shrewd sense of how much heat the organism could take at any given time;

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

There was, I found, always more to learn.

the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.