Quotes About Wisdom

Light is the symbol of truth.

The pennoned reeds, that, as the west-wind blew, Gleamed and sighed plaintively, as if they knew What music slept enchanted in each stem, Till Pan should choose some happy one of them, And with wise lips enlife it through and through.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last?

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

The future belongs to the educated.

We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.

Though it is a great mistake to make friends of the wicked and foolish, it is unwise to make enemies of them, for they are very numerous.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.

Many a blessing has been recognized too late.

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning -- the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.

If you have written a clever and conclusive but scathing letter, keep it back till the next day, and it will very often never go at all.

Battles are often won before they are fought.

The veil is slowly rising, but as regards innumerable questions we must be content to remain in ignorance.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

You must rouse into people's consciousness their own prudence and strength, if you want to raise their character.

True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world.

once inserted into the cosmos, once his individual life is set going in harmony with the cosmic order, the wise man understands that we simple mortals are merely a fragment of this whole, an atom of eternity, so to speak, one element of a totality that cannot disappear. So that, ultimately, for the sage, death ceases to be truly real. In a nutshell, death is but a passage from one state to another—and, considered as such, it should no longer hold any terrors for us.

The whole sense of the voyage of Odysseus, which we shall trace or retrace in chapter three, starts here: the good life is the life reconciled to what is the case, the life lived in its natural place, within the cosmic order, and it behooves each of us to find this place and accomplish this voyage if we want one day to arrive in the harbor of wisdom, of serenity.

To maintain power requires justice and intelligence as well as force.

Philosophy wants us to get ourselves out of trouble by utilising our own resources,

If progeny and heroism—descendants and earthly renown—do not enable us to confront death with a greater degree of serenity, if these attributes afford no true access to the good life, toward what source of wisdom then can we turn?

If you ever manage to make a fool of me, I'll deserve what I get.