Quotes About Wisdom

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide...

Every word was once a poem.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.