Quotes About Wisdom

Men, I had often observed, were never happier than when they believed they were imparting wisdom.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

Will it ever be perfect?" I wondered. "No," he told me with a smile. "Nothing in life is. But, my dear mademoiselle, life is not about achievement. It is about the effort. If one takes pleasure in every step, one enjoys the whole journey.

Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman's vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

I think all God really expects is a little common sense and kindness out of us. Surely He's too busy to keep a tally of all our misdeeds. That would make Him nothing more than a sort of junior clerk with a very important sense of Himself, wouldn't it?

I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything . . . To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable. —QUEEN VICTORIA TO HER GRANDDAUGHTER, PRINCESS VICTORIA OF HESSE, 22 AUGUST 1883

He must have broken dozens of hearts in his day, for even now he reminded me of nothing so much as a magnificently grizzled old lion. He might be winding down, but life was not yet finished with him.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.'" "A

I studied him back, appreciating the lines of care at the corners of his eyes, the silver threads in his hair that had been bought with years of responsibility.

I wondered, late into the darkness, why malevolence in the elderly should be so much more frightening than in the young. Is it because they were supposed to be wiser? Nobler? Or simply because we liked to believe they were past such passions? It was comforting to think that the sharper emotions could simply dull with time, taking the worst of our suffering with them.

I can only quote Xenocrates, dear lady. 'I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

I gave him a watery smile. "There is an old Spanish proverb: 'Take what you want. Take it, said God. And pay.'" "We have paid every minute of our lives. Let someone else pay,

He'd learned many years ago that the loud and overemotional meant loud and overemotional, not right.

Amazing. College boys are known for big words, not common sense.

It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.

It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama.

Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light--a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.

Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end

He's going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn't any.