Quotes About Wisdom

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well half an hour?

Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

The world we live in is but thickened light.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

a man only knows what he's experienced

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know the truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single all-knowing master.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting in vain.

Every[one] I meet is in some way my superior.