Quotes About Wisdom

Simpletons talk of the past, wise men of the present, and fools of the future.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.

Experience, after all, is a trustworthier friend than intuition.

not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking.

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

Novels are longer than life.

Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.

Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher.

But what if you are already sixty, seventy years old, eighty, ninety? Let the thunder roll. You've got something to say. You are alive and you don't know for how long. (None of us really knows for how long.) No matter your age there is a sense of urgency, to make life immediate and relevant.

For thousands of years

I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful.

There is a separation between parents and children that shouldn't be breached when the children are young. The parents' adult follies are private. They're disturbing and hard to understand. But eventually the kids wise up, the follies start leaking out, and the parents are revealed in all their flawed humanity. Dad and I were about to cross that boundary for good.

Always there is something more to know

the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

was right. His much-vaunted mind had done

football field, but you don't play football all the time," says Kenzie. "A running back can't always rush. Sometimes you have to hold back. Think of what might happen if I used my super strength all the time.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

As real spiritual life declines, it has ever been the tendency to cease to advance in the knowledge of the truth.