Quotes About Wisdom

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

I sit in happy mediation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue to eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

L'atto di creare è generalmente riservato agli dei e ai poeti, ma anche la gente più umile può superare questa restrizione se sa come farlo. Per piantare un pino, per esempio, non è necessario essere un dio né un poeta, basta possedere una pala.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.