Quotes About Wisdom

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them.

all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their hearts to wisdom.

One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be. She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead -obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life.

Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid.

the very way Mrs. Arbuthnot parted her hair suggested a great calm that could only proceed from wisdom.

It seemed, however, that I had. I didn't want any more, so I got them. And now I am glad, for if, as I had sometimes wished at that time, I could have finished with a consciousness become unbearable, if, in other words, I had then died, I would never have known a great many very beautiful and delightful things. Evidently, then, it is wise not too soon to lose patience with life, but to wait and see what it may have round its next corner. I

We are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets in new light.

Experience has taught me that whenever anything is on the tip of my tongue the best thing to do is to keep it there.

The less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and ... no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity.

Really I have been thankful on my knees every time I have not said what I was going to say when I've been annoyed.

I would have all couples neatly paired in years, the forties with the forties, and the twenties with the twenties. Should the forties, as sometimes happens, not care about other forties, and wish to frequent twenties, in their own interests they should be discouraged, and equally those twenties should be discouraged who, with the inexperience of their age, suppose they could be lastingly happy with forties. Fortunately

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant . But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life you give so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore.

Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.

When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.

I think it is better to know the worst, rather than trying to imagine it.

When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.

But you can't stop knowing something, can you?

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.

And who knows, thought Cadfael, which is in the right, the young man who sees the best in all, and trusts all, or the old one who suspects all until he has probed them through and through? The one may stumble into a snare now and then, but at least enjoy sunshine along the way, between falls. The other may never miss his footing, but seldom experience joy. Better find a way somewhere between!

Even grief has its arrogance." "Then you have learned, my son, that vengeance belongs only to God?" "More than that, Father," said Luc. "I have learned that in God's hands vengeance is safe. However long delayed, however strangely manifested, the reckoning is sure.