Quotes About Wisdom

as we have seen, what

Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair.

better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.

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

To recognize that 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 to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.

A precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation and accommodation to the extent of one's ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one's inherent capacities.

It is the task of philosophy to let you down gently.

I'm nothing, I'm everything,' he declared. 'The street is my mother. The sun is my father. What more should I ask of life?

My mother used to say, Delia if sex ever rears its ugly head, close your eyes before you see the rest of it.

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

You don't put your life into books. You find it there.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

Do you know,' she said one afternoon as they were reading in her study, 'do you know the area in which one would truly excel?' 'No, ma'am?' 'The pub quiz. One has been everywhere, seen everything, and though one might have difficulty with pop music and some sport, when it comes to the capital of Zimbabwe, say, or the principle exports of New South Wales, I have all that at my fingertips.

The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.

Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.

Silläkin riskillä että kuulostan paistilta, kuningatar sanoi, kirjat tekevät ihmisestä kypsemmän.

Desde luego-dijo la reina-, pero aleccionar no es leer. De hecho es la antítesis de la lectura. Aleccionar es sucinto, concreto y pertinente. Leer es desordenado, disperso y siempre incitante. El aleccionamiento cierra un tema, la lectura lo abre.

At eighty, things do not occur; they recur.

One does try not to be an Old Git but they don't make it easy.

Reading was not doing… and as old as she was, she was still a doer.

To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous.

Non si mette la vita nei libri. La si trova.

Books are wonderful, aren't they? … At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak, they tenderize one. … he concurred again, but had no notion what she was on about.