Quotes About Wisdom

Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice

Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.

I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that "it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

That [man] can compress the most words in the fewest ideas of any man I ever knew.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

If the good people, in their wisdom, shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.

My old father used to have a saying: If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter.

I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.

The things I want to know are in books my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Better remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.