Quotes About Wisdom

only a fool would argue with a fool!

Knowledge enlightens.

He thinks being black means having plenty of attitude; I think having plenty of knowledge is what black is all about;

Wisdom was knowing what to do. Skill was the ability to do it.Virtue was doing it. When wisdom didn't subdue anger, anger destroyed everything.

To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless.

In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise.

A smart person ought to be smart enough to see clearly the limitations of his species.

I thought in over a thousand years I'd seen all there was to see.

It was a very happy time in my life, and that was an important lesson too: to learn how little it took to be happy, to understand from a young age that the human heart is a small and delicate vase. You must handle it carefully, but in the right circumstances, it does not take much to fill it up.

Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

Never underestimate your listener's intelligence, or overestimate you listener's information.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god's messenger.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision.

Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn't we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.

The Greeks—who knew everything—knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.

But I am wise if not yet quite old, wanting the poem more than the lover, wanting words more than the sticky dew men secrete in their private places.

I am unimaginably old—fifty. Only witches live to be fifty! Good women die in childbirth at seventeen as I nearly did. By fifty I should be dead or a crone—with my dark looks and my somewhat crooked spine—which I have always disguised with capes of multicolored silk. My youth is gone, but my vanity is not. How can I still dream of love at fifty? I must be mad!

Sometimes it seems both our kids and our parents were smarter than we were. We fell somewhere between our parents' thirties idealism and our kids' eighties cynicism. Somewhere deep down we still believe that all we need is love, love, love. Somewhere deep down we question how we got grey hair. How on earth did we get to be the grown-ups? The wonder is that our kids are growing up -- despite all that we did to destroy them.

readers who think I have answers when all I have are a few pointed questions...

It's written that learning is more precious than rubies, more lasting than gold. Rubies may be lost and gold stolen, but that which you learn is yours forever.

Si je m'intéresse à ce que pensent les gens cons, je n'aurai plus de temps à ce que pensent les gens intelligents.

Si ce que tu dis n'est pas plus beau que le silence, alors tais-toi