Quotes About Wisdom

For every grain of wit, there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.

It is better to hear than to speak.

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.

An idea lights a thousand candles.

we are what we know.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

What will you have? quoth God; pay for it, and take it.

Then I said, "I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.

The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.

Is it not the true scholar the only true master?

As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

It is not length of life, but depth of life

moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is hard to carry

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence.

There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

shallow men believe in luck, strong men believe in cause and effect

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

Follow the quiet voice within you that is telling you where to go.

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws

I have forgotten the books I have read, and so I have the dinners I have eaten, but they both helped to make me.