Quotes About Wisdom

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.

A person without a shadow should keep out of the sun, that is the only safe and rational plan.

Some of these little girls are afraid to admit they are getting older. I am not afraid. You can't put your finger in the sun and stop time.

Not to be a Bible-thumper, but there really is nothing new under the sun.

I'm exploring the maturity, the wisdom that just comes from having gone around the sun 50 times. My experience is, 'Oh, I'm never really going to get it right. I'm never going to get it done. But that's not the point here.' The point is the journey.

Because too many times in life there's just one person that I met, just one thing that I heard, one movie that I saw, one song that was sung, that changed my life. So I'm always trying to stay awake to be in the moment, and capture the moments when they come, because they come and go all the time.

In my long innings, I have seen many sunrises and many sunsets; many good and bad times.

When I was doing 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' I was asked, 'If there was one part of your life that you could erase, what would it be?' And I was so stunned by that. I thought: 'Nothing.' I would keep all the good bits and the bad bits, because those things made me who I am.

I've turned down all sorts of good things accidentally, too. I read the script for 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind' and thought, 'This makes no sense.' Then I went to the cinema to see it. Well, what an idiot.

Every one of you is a super genius if you just focus your common sense.

As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.

Knowledge is sometimes superfluous: when we need it, we have it not.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.