Quotes About Wisdom

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you. Ovid, epigram in Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Only to read their letters, notes and poems, not to see them smiling … They distilled their wisdom in writing, not in prizes … For a kind of heavenly sense made clear, for an hour, deep inside us: That's why we read the wise.

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose also the first announcement of death.

I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly

Ignorance is the enemy, curiosity the weapon of choice

Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself.

Youth believes itself immortal. There is a cure for such an attitude, but unfortunately it is a cure from which one never recovers.

In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.

I hope that as a totally literate human being that you don't even know what "illiteracy" is because it simply doesn't exist in your world.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

He was absurd, but then who isn't.

There's no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Life is not about receiving. It is about giving, knowing that someone might learn, understand or grow that little bit from the experience

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey.

Wisdom isn't about finding a quick answer key to life—like turning to the index, finding your problem, and turning to the right page so it all works out. Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time. Both

For any one group today to think it has the best grasp on the creator of the universe is a form of insanity. Run away—far and quickly—when you see this.

If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God's terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.

If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn't look anything like it does. But if the Bible's main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom—holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.

Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the courage to sit in those questions for as long as necessary before seeking a way forward.