Quotes About Wisdom

Abraham Lincoln, said in 1838, when he and the United States were both very young, "Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.

An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution.

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.

wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The

In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.