Quotes About Wisdom

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.

Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserved.

Mankind will never see an end of trouble until... lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power... become lovers of wisdom.

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey thither.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he grows old may learn many things—for he can no more learn much than he can run much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.

We do not learn and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not personal experience.

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Knowledge is true opinion.