Quotes About Wisdom

Indeed, if we read merely to stock our head with ideas, to feel superior to others, or to appear learned, then our reading is useless and vain.

In the Bible, God uses several different types of writing to convey his truth. There are narratives (often with commentary), preaching and exhortation (as in the prophets), laws and regulations, the distilled wisdom of Proverbs, philosophical discussion (as in Job and Ecclesiastes), and poetry (as in the Psalms). Poetry has its own ways.

To discover the 'traces of God' in nature does not indeed save us, but it does mane us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated in it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination.

When life gives you lemons, please, just don't squirt them in other people's eyes.

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

Traditions] give voice to what in some sense we already know, but inarticulately. When tradition is silenced, people have to work all these things out for themselves - and that is impossible.

Experience does not interpret itself.

Some seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. Others seek knowledge that they may themselves be known: that is vanity. But there are still others who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others, and that is charity." The

A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.

We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. GEORGE ORWELL

To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This book is an attempt at re-statement.

Every true genius is bound to be naive.

Only a fool asks for happiness in this foolish, worn world. We are . . . content . . . together. That is enough for a while.

I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

You can't possibly enjoy growing older unless you make peace with where you are right now.

If we think effectively and productively about growing older, the odds are good that we'll never have to grow old.

One of the ways to grow older without growing old is to become a beneficiary of your past rather than its victim or its prisoner.

We sat down in front of the earth's great philosopher-the Fire.

In the Bible there is that which meets every need of man, which answers every mood, which speaks to every heart.

Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.