Quotes About Wisdom

What good is genius without humility? What value does it have if it isn't married undivorceable to kindness and empathy?

stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning.

Like her grandfather, she is a knowledge sponge.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine. You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind. She

We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.

He knew what he didn't know. Dorian Purcell, on the other hand, seemed not to know what he didn't know.

you have a great deal of time to fill. The most pleasant way to fill it is by studying and learning things. One of the things Woody had greatly enjoyed learning was classical mythology.

If we're guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn't really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn't have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it's reckless.

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers…well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view.

Who is more foolish—the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light? —MAURICE FREEHILL

Sometimes truth was elusive...

no act of creation was finer or more beautiful than the creation of an intelligent mind.

I've read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does.

A lesser mind might try to hide its brilliance behind a mask of stupidity. He chooses, instead, to conceal his true wisdom under a flamboyant pretense of erudition that he is pleased to let people think is the best of him.

Anyway, the human heart being what it was, those who erased the past would in fact purge only the wisdom and preserve the evils.

She believed in pursuing the truth of things rather than living in the pleasure of ignorance, and never before had a mystery as abstruse as this challenged her.

Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness, and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we're here to learn.

Katie says, "What do you know that I don't?

Although Woody had studied and learned a great deal, he was well aware that there were vast

areas of knowledge about which he was ignorant and probably always would be. There was only so much time.

But the heart is deceitful above all things.

Men are often made stupid by love.

My intellect is God-given. I've a sacred obligation to use it.

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.