Quotes About Wisdom

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence, that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

The life of the law has not been logic but experience.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.