Quotes About Wisdom

There are 2 ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men.

He that sets his home on fire because his fingers are frostbitten can never be a fit instructor in the method of providing our habitations with a cheerful and salutary warmth.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, that loves courage, but commands counsel.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

A brave people will certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions; and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.

To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men . However, he attempted it.

A revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.

where there is no sound reason, there can be no real virtue.

In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

it were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had

In history, a great volume is unravelled for our instruction, drawing materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

There is no qualification for government, but virtue and wisdom, whether actual or presumptive. . . . Every thing ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man.

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,—a blind and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform.