Quotes About Wisdom

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.

No one single person needs to be a genius or a visionary or even a great artist for the result to be permanent and to transcend generations. In the same way, the clubs we make are collectively smarter than the people we are. Reason, like musicals, emerges from the meeting of many minds.

Its first postulate is that the contemporary urban environment is so complex and so vexatious in its demands that no group of ordinary, unaided human beings can hope to understand it, let alone manage it wisely.

But memory remains, experience is a great teacher, and, after all, one has lived to play both parts. ~ E.D. Morel

For even a century's worth of bloodshed after the war that was supposed to end all wars, we are painfully far from the day when most people on earth will have the wisdom to feel, as did Alice Wheeldon in her prison cell, "The world is my country.

Ignorance is not bliss; it's a missed opportunity

Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything

Sometimes you really want to say Duh, but you can't. It's a part of growing up, I guess.

They were just people. They were too smart and too stupid to be anything else.

It's at times like this, said Pu Sto, massaging her wounded shoulder gently and grimacing, when I'm sitting inside Shakespeare's nose about to be shot through the torso - for the second time today - by one of our government's most capable assassins, that I really wished I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine

I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.

Nous avons appris en Europe, par une dure expérience, que les gouvernements étaient bons à quelque chose, et que la liberté mal cultivée donnait, comme tous les arbres sauvages, des fruits souvent très-amers.

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

But where do we find what's lasting? Where do the deathless things hide?

Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backward.

You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.

She was her mother's favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

Life's tough and even tougher when you're stupid

Your body is a longbow carved from hickory, her father said. Your body is a blade sharpened by tears, her mother said.

She was her mother's favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

She remembers Voltaire's warning about the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Foolish people spend time and money poring over horoscopes and consulting so-called psychics trying to see the dark unknown. How much better to walk through life holding the hand of One who knows the way and cares for us!