Quotes About Wisdom

Oh no, no," said the little fly; "to ask me is in vain, For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again.

Now I predict the future / merely by listening to echoes. A slamming door / can tell you everything you need to know. It's not a trick / only a simple matter of wisdom, an obsessive attention / to dreams. — Mary Jo Bang, from "The Oracle," Apology for Want: Poems . (Middlebury; 1st edition July 15, 1997)

I don't usually look back. When I make foolish decisions, I file the consequences under lessons learned and tell myself not to be stupid in the same way again.

Samuel Johnson said a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience," Kirkland said.

Su abuela siempre le aconsejaba que no fuera demasiado explícita al formular sus deseos, porque a veces la mejor solución es una que no se le ocurriría nunca.

Here's a lesson for you, Clare. Frivolity is usually far more profitable than necessity.

ROTA TARO ORAT TORA ATOR The wheel of Tarot speaks the law of Hathor.

The Major and Minor Arcana into which the deck is divided are "arks," or containers that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "hold the great secret of nature that alchemists sought to find," the concealed knowledge of the self.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

A house is just a bunch of lumber and nails, Hattie. It's just a thing. Never fall in love with anything that can't love you back.

Central banks don't have divine wisdom. They try to do the best analysis they can and must be prepared to stand or fall by the quality of that analysis.

The truth invariably arrives several years after you need it.

When you're so undecided, it's better not to do anything, the right course of action is to take no action at all

A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman.

He'd assumed that you went to school because you had to learn things, starting off with the easy stuff and moving on to the bigger issues, and once you'd learned them that was it, the way ahead opened up and thereafter life was simple and straightforward. What a joke. The older he got, the more complicated and obscure everything became.

Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.

Knowing that death is hovering in the wings is a great leveller. We regret so many things - and yet what does it matter in the end? We can't change anything

ignorance is like a cow that a lot of people can't stop milkin!

Misfortunes make us wise