Quotes About Wisdom

Sorcery has been called Magic: but Magic is Wisdom, and there is no wisdom in Sorcery

Aquele que imagina que todos os frutos amadurecem ao mesmo tempo, como as cerejas, nada sabe a respeito das uvas.

For who could be taught the knowledge of experience from paper? Since paper has the property to produce lazy and sleepy people, who are haughty and learn to persuade themselves and to fl y without wings. . . . Therefore the most fundamental thing is to hasten to experience.

forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! control the present! Live supremely well now! This is the way of the wise...

Being grown up and in a serious relationship, I've learned so much. I'm happier than I've every been.

One priceless bit of advice my great-grandfather fave my grandfather, and my grandfather gave me: "Success is never final. Failure is never fatal.

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

Rightly understood, a myth is an effort to tell truths that cannot be told with mere facts or known by the senses and the mind alone, truths that take form only in that integrative place called the heart.

Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.

The God whom I know dwells quietly in the root system of the very nature of things.

Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

Behind this understanding of vocation is a truth that the ego does not want to hear because it threatens the ego's turf: everyone has a life that is different from the "I" of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the "I" who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self.

My countrymen,…think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.20

First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole and respond to them wisely in the moment requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does -- maybe more.

Way has never opened in front of me…but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that has had the same guiding effect.

Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience.

Wherefore all these things are but the names which mortals have given, believing them to be true

Let reason alone decide

Tis necessary for thee to learn all things, both the abiding essence of persuasive truth, and men's opinions in which rests no true belief

Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none the less shalt thou learn of these things also, since thou must judge approvedly of the things that seem to men as thou goest through all things in thy journey.

Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all.