Wisdom Quotes

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.
– Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.
Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as scientists.
– James Newman
Wise kings generally have wise counselors and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.
– Diogenes the Cynic
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
– Felix Frankfurter
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
– Honore de Balzac
Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.
– Gerald Brenan
Wisdom is not acquired save as the result of investigation.
– Sara Teasdale
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
– Paul Ricoeur
Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life - in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk and to make our words and actions all of a color.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
– George Santayana
Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.
– Herbert Hoover
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.
– Khalil Gibran
Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
– Samuel Smiles
Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.
– William Dean Howells
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
– William Whitehead
Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.
– Johan Huizinga
Where fear is present, wisdom cannot be.
– Lactantius
Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.
– Saadi
When you're used to being prepared to reject conventional wisdom, it leaves you open to learn more.
– Mayim Bialik
When I wrote Living in the Light, I wanted to share about how I live my own life and to encourage people to tap into their own inner wisdom.
– Shakti Gawain
What's different now is that while political leaders used to give talking points to talk radio, now talk-radio hosts are giving talking points to political leaders. It's all part of the suffocating spin cycle we're in. In media, politics and publishing, the conventional wisdom is to play to this base.
– John Avlon
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
– Jean Jacques Rousseau
What I lack in energy, I have in wisdom.
– Marcia Cross
What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.
– Wade Davis
We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters.
– General Robert E. Lee
We live in a culture that doesn't acknowledge or validate human intuition and doesn't encourage us to rely on our intuitive wisdom.
– Shakti Gawain
We learned in World War II that no single nation holds a monopoly on wisdom, morality or right to power, but that we must fight for the weak and promote democracy.
– Joe Baca
We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance.
– Dora Russell
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
– Marcel Proust
We don't pray for the land. We pray for the humans, all humans... starting with the president, Mohammed Morsi, and all officials, and for God to give everyone wisdom and responsibility to manage the affairs of this country and its people in true Egyptian spirit.
– Pope Theodoros II
We all have within us a deep wisdom, but sometimes we don't know we have it.
– Shakti Gawain
Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.
– Julian Casablancas
Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom.
– Mary Astell
True wisdom listens more, talks less and can get along with all types of people.
– Kiana Tom
True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.
– Akhenaton
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
– William Hazlitt
To suppose more than one supreme Source of infinite wisdom, power, and all perfections, is to assert that there is no supreme Being in existence.
– Adam Clarke
To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.
– Jose Bergamin
To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius.
– Minna Antrim
To keep your secret is wisdom to expect others to keep it is folly.
– William Samuel Johnson
To keep your secret is wisdom but to expect others to keep it is folly.
– Samuel Johnson
To build a great company, which is a CEO's job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.
– Carly Fiorina
Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
– Alexander Pope
This society in which we live is radically changing. What previous generations saw as evil is now embraced as being good. It is a dangerous and slippery slope upon which we stand when we reject what Solomon called the beginning of wisdom - the fear of God.
– Ray Comfort
This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.
– Paul Ricoeur
This fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom. This consciousness of sin is the straight pathway to heaven.
– Joseph Barber Lightfoot
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
– Stanford Moore
This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.
– Thomas Dekker
They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.
– Friedrich Schiller
They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force, and their submission is wisdom but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.
– George Combe
There's the conventional wisdom, of which I have none, where you get a record deal, you get a publicist, you get a campaign, and you do the tour, but none of that adds up to things like nuance and subtlety and dynamic.
– Chris Robinson
There's always a miasma of misinformation emerging from the higher education sector as to which are the 'best' courses to take. My advice would always be to ignore the perceived wisdom and look for the most reliable evidence on the ground.
– David Puttnam
There is a trade off - as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.
– Kenny Rogers
Theology in general seems to me a substitution of human ingenuity for divine wisdom.
– Julia Ward Howe
The word philosophy sounds high-minded, but it simply means the love of wisdom. If you love something, you don't just read about it you hug it, you mess with it, you play with it, you argue with it.
– Hugh Jackman
The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.
– Dean Inge
The wisdom of God's Word is quite clear on believers being unequally yoked. And marrying someone who is not a Christian - who is not a daily disciple of Christ - is being unequally yoked, regardless of what their beliefs might be.
– Pat Robertson
The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it.
– Esther Williams
The weak have remedies, the wise have joys superior wisdom is superior bliss.
– Edward Young
The truest wisdom is a resolute determination.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
The study of history is the beginning of political wisdom.
– Jean Bodin
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
– Milan Kundera
The result showed the wisdom of your orders.
– John Bigelow
The Relation we bear to the Wisdom of the Father, the Son of His Love, gives us indeed a dignity which otherwise we have no pretence to. It makes us something, something considerable even in God's Eyes.
– Mary Astell
The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.
– Ed Miliband
The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.
– Pierre Charron
The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
– Christopher Lasch
The key to wisdom is knowing all the right questions.
– John A. Simone, Sr.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
– George Santayana
The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it.
– Constantin Stanislavski
The first point of wisdom is to discern that which is false the second, to know that which is true.
– Lactantius
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
The difference between chirping out of turn and a faux pas depends on what kind of a bar you're in.
– Wilson Mizner
The day of fortune is like a harvest day, We must be busy when the corn is ripe.
– Torquato Tasso
The current wisdom now is that if the three networks are covering the news the same way the difference is the anchor people. I think that won't be true in the future.
– Roone Arledge
The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom.
– Ezra Stiles
The clouds may drop down titles and estates, and wealth may seek us, but wisdom must be sought.
– Edward Young
The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb.
– Drew Curtis
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
– Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Start wide, expand further, and never look back.
– Arnold Schwarzenegger
Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.
– Robert Duvall
Spend time reflecting on your emotional and physical existence and how that applies to the voice. You have to apply that wisdom and experience when you sing - it's what comes through.
– K. D. Lang
Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.
– Robert H. Schuller
Some wisdom you must learn from one who's wise.
– Euripides
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
– Tobias Smollett
Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.
– Plutarch
Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.
– W. Clement Stone
Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.
– Laurence Sterne
Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.
– James Buchan
Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.
– Paul Greengrass
Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.
– William Penn
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
– Alan Kay
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
– Bernard De Voto
People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
– Anna Quindlen
Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.
– Keith Miller
Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
– John Patrick
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
– Henry Miller
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
– Wilfrid Sheed
One part of wisdom is knowing what you don't need anymore and letting it go.
– Jane Fonda
Of prosperity mortals can never have enough.
– Aeschylus