wisdom
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘wisdom’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
-
“No man is the wiser for his learning it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon but wit and wisdom are born with a man.” -John Selden
-
“A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.” -John Henry Newman
-
“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
-
“Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, ‘Just watch!’” -Bill Bradley
-
“Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.” -Ruth St. Denis
-
“Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.” -George William Curtis
-
“My past is my wisdom to use today… my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides.” -Gene Oliver
-
“However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.” -Wilhelm von Humboldt
-
“There is as much wisdom in listening as there is in speaking – and that goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones.” -Daniel Dae Kim
-
“The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.” -Stephen Gardiner
-
“Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in relations between the two great nations on earth.” -Mikhail Gorbachev
-
“Your art kind of changes as you get older, by nature of the fact that you’re hopefully gaining wisdom and you’re starting to watch things with a better overview.” -Sheryl Crow
-
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.” -Stanley Kunitz
-
“Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.” -John Cheever
-
“God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.” -Johannes Tauler
-
“Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.” -Christopher Reeve
-
“Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.” -Phyllis Theroux
-
“The all-seeing eye of God beheld our deplorable state infinite pity touched the heart of the Father of mercies and infinite wisdom laid the plan of our recovery.” -David Brainerd
-
“I don’t think I really have any wisdom. Stay out of trouble. Good luck. Stay away from women because they will burn you, haha.” -Jason Aldean
-
“The greatest wisdom is to realize one’s lack of it.” -Constantin Stanislavski
-
“It’s very hard to know what wisdom is.” -James Hillman
-
“I always prayed that God would give me the wisdom and the vision to do the things on this earth that I was supposed to do to express His life and love and His will.” -Billy Ray Cyrus
-
“As a parent and a citizen, I’ll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs’s example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.” -Eric Alterman
-
“I always told, Sandra Bullock was my student when she was younger, I always told her it’s important that we hold on to our insecurity, the wisdom of insecurity.” -Sally Kirkland
-
“Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.” -Gabriel Marcel
-
“The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there’s a single numeric average. But if it’s a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that’s crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.” -Jaron Lanier
-
“There is no knowledge, no light, no wisdom that you are in possession of, but what you have received it from some source.” -Brigham Young
-
“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.” -Isaac D’Israeli
-
“Putting is like wisdom – partly a natural gift and partly the accumulation of experience.” -Arnold Palmer
-
“I am a poor student sitting at the feet of giants, yearning for their wisdom and begging for lessons that might one day make me a complete artist, so that if all goes well, I may one day sit beside them.” -Rod Taylor
-
“Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible changes of life.” -George Arliss
-
“Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is imortal.” -Isocrates
-
“The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.” -Samuel Smiles
-
“In complete darkness, it is only knowledge and wisdom that separates us.” -Janet Jackson
-
“I’m very accepting with my age. It’s like notches on your belt: experience, wisdom, and a different kind of beauty. There comes a day when you’ve become comfortable in your skin.” -Zoe Saldana
-
“There is a trade off – as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.” -Kenny Rogers
-
“One part of wisdom is knowing what you don’t need anymore and letting it go.” -Jane Fonda
-
“It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.” -Anthony Trollope
-
“The clouds may drop down titles and estates, and wealth may seek us, but wisdom must be sought.” -Edward Young
-
“We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.” -Arthur Helps
-
“When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I’m older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.” -Michael Sheen
-
“The plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios. But with every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.” -Dick Cheney
-
“Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.” -Bob Woodward
-
“Even when you have doubts, take that step. Take chances. Mistakes are never a failure – they can be turned into wisdom.” -Cat Cora
-
“In particular, for younger researchers on whom the future of mankind may depend. We believe that they are working with all the scientific wisdom at their disposal for the preservation of the inheritance of the earth and for the lasting survival of mankind.” -Kenichi Fukui
-
“Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.” -Joseph Stiglitz
-
“Never say never, but the thought of electively cutting oneself is beyond my grasp, and I also object to it politically. Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don’t care to make.” -Debra Winger
-
“If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.” -Jane Smiley
-
“It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.” -Margaret Fuller
-
“Evil can be a teacher, if you look at the wisdom of its negative power.” -Tom Brown, Jr.
-
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.” -Walter Benjamin
-
“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.” -Milan Kundera
-
“Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country’s principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.” -Chris Christie
-
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.” -John Updike
-
“As you walk in God’s divine wisdom, you will surely begin to see a greater measure of victory and good success in your life.” -Joseph Prince
-
“Wisdom and deep intelligence require an honest appreciation of mystery.” -Thomas Moore
-
“I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.” -Alex Grey
-
“It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.” -Freeman Dyson
-
“Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.” -Jonathan Sacks
-
“If you have a vaccine or an antidote that people can benefit from, you’re not going to want to keep it to yourself. You’re going to want to spread that wisdom or whatever to as many people as you can, so everybody can benefit from it.” -will.i.am
-
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” -Igor Stravinsky
-
“Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It’s about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it’s about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.” -Tom Peters
-
“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
-
“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
-
“If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.” -Nigel Farage
-
“It’s received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.” -Julie Burchill
-
“Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.” -Myrtle Reed
-
“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.” -Evelyn Waugh
-
“History is filled with tragic examples of wars that result from diplomatic impasse. Whether in our local communities or in international relations, the skillful use of our communicative capacities to negotiate and resolve differences is the first evidence of human wisdom.” -Daisaku Ikeda
-
“Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.” -Cyril Connolly
-
“In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.” -Benjamin Carson
-
“Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.” -Alfred North Whitehead
-
“All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.” -James A. Garfield
-
“No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.” -Erica Jong
-
“My mother is a great source of advice and wisdom and consolation for me.” -Katherine Heigl
-
“Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” -Norman Cousins
-
“Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.” -Elizabeth Gaskell
-
“I’m not wise, but the beginning of wisdom is there it’s like relaxing into – and an acceptance of – things.” -Tina Turner
-
-
“The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it.” -Frederick William Robertson
-
“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
-
“I always see where I didn’t do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That’s a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.” -Vera Wang
-
“Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.” -James Buchan
-
“Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.” -Julian Casablancas
-
“If you have the guts to keep making mistakes, your wisdom and intelligence leap forward with huge momentum.” -Holly Near
-
“After 25-plus years as a lawyer, prosecutor, and defense attorney, I have developed a deep appreciation for both the wisdom of the law and the role that jurists play in framing the rights and responsibilities that define our society.” -Eliot Spitzer
-
“It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.” -Georg C. Lichtenberg
-
“The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.” -George MacDonald
-
-
“Around ’93, ’94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.” -Marc Andreessen
-
“Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.” -Laurence Sterne
-
“Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.” -Karl Kraus
-
“Many spiritual teachers – in Buddhism, in Islam – have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.” -Bell Hooks
-
“Knowledge is going to make you stronger. Knowledge is going to let you control your life. Knowledge is going to give you the wisdom to teach their children. Knowledge is the thing that makes you smile in the face of disaster.” -Avery Brooks
-
“To build a great company, which is a CEO’s job, sometimes you have to stand up against conventional wisdom.” -Carly Fiorina
-
“Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore.” -Elizabeth Wurtzel
-
“What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped.” -Tony Campolo
-
“This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.” -William Law
-
“Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.” -Herbert Hoover
-
-
“For all my education, accomplishments, and so called ‘wisdom’… I can’t fathom my own heart.” -Michael Caine
-
“Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
-
“Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.” -Havelock Ellis
-
-
“Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.” -William J. Clinton
-
“Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.” -Dale Turner
-
“I don’t think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.” -Elizabeth Gilbert
-
“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
-
“In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.” -Louis D. Brandeis
-
“I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or better than friendship.” -Pietro Aretino
-
“I don’t turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.” -Susan Orlean
-
“I’m married. My wife, Stella – a beautiful woman. She’s brought a lot of peace to my life, a lot of wisdom.” -Anthony Hopkins
-
“Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.” -Graham Greene
-
“Every day, every birthday candle I blow out, every penny I throw over my shoulder in a wishing well, every time my daughter says, ‘Let’s make a wish on a star,’ there’s one thing I wish for: wisdom.” -Rene Russo
-
“Great wisdom is generous petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.” -Zhuang Zi
-
“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.” -Leonard Nimoy
-
“Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.” -Saadi
-
-
“Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.” -John Patrick
-
“The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation’s proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.” -William Feather
-
“Conventional wisdom on government’s role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax government transfer payments have become less progressive.” -Paul Ryan
-
“Full of wisdom are the ordinations of fate.” -Friedrich Schiller
-
“I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.” -Eric Clapton
-
“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
-
“It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed ‘Wisdom.’ And then I know exactly what is going to follow: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’” -Ludwig Wittgenstein
-
“If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.” -George Byron
-
“Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.” -Alan Paton
-
“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
-
“Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.” -Edith Wharton
-
“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.” -Jimmy Carter
-
“It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.” -Dee Hock
-
“Mixing one’s wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.” -Bertolt Brecht
-
“If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.” -Omar N. Bradley
-
“Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness.” -Sacha Guitry
-
“Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.” -Charles Caleb Colton
-
“They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.” -William Cowper
-
“To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” -Herman Melville
-
“The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.” -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
-
-
“Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of ’em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.” -William Congreve
-
“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker
-
“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
-
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.” -Adlai E. Stevenson
-
“Central banks don’t have divine wisdom. They try to do the best analysis they can and must be prepared to stand or fall by the quality of that analysis.” -Mary Kay Ash
-
“Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.” -Baltasar Gracian
-
“To acquire knowledge, one must study but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” -Marilyn vos Savant
-
“Great wisdom is generous petty wisdom is contentious.” -Zhuangzi
-
“Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.” -Paul Klee
-
“Every speaker has a mouth An arrangement rather neat. Sometimes it’s filled with wisdom. Sometimes it’s filled with feet.” -Robert Orben
-
“If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.” -Sophocles
-
“Through mutual understanding, sincerity and goodwill, and with great wisdom and broad views, the leaders on both sides should jointly initiate new opportunities for peace, stability, cooperation and mutual benefit.” -Chen Shui-bian
-
“Lord, bless me with the ability to achieve all that I can, and the wisdom to realize it doesn’t all have to be by tomorrow!” -William Eardley IV
-
“The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.” -Jean Cocteau
-
“To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.” -Wilson Mizner
-
“Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
-
“In societies where mature workers are respected and where their wisdom is respected, everybody benefits. Workers are more engaged and productive. Their health is better. They live longer.” -Deepak Chopra
-
“I love being. There’s so much wisdom in it. You wake up in the morning and you think, Hey, isn’t it great just being?” -Gwyneth Paltrow
-
“It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.” -Thomas Hobbes
-
“My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.” -William Tecumseh Sherman
-
“Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.” -Abigail Adams
-
“We are to seek wisdom and understanding only in the length of days.” -Robert Hall
-
“Wisdom has never made a bigot, but learning has.” -Josh Billings
-
“Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.” -Will Durant
-
“All human wisdom is summed up in two words wait and hope.” -Alexandre Dumas
-
“The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.” -George Santayana
-
“In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.” -Thomas Huxley
-
“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.” -Theodore Isaac Rubin
-
“The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.” -William Osler
-
“And I pray thee, loving Jesus, that as Thou hast graciously given me to drink in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, so Thou wouldst mercifully grant me to attain one day to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom and to appear forever before Thy face.” -Venerable Bede
-
“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.” -Henry Miller
-
-
-
“Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.” -James Madison
-
“Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.” -Walter Scott
-
“Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.” -Joseph Addison
-
“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.” -John Kenneth Galbraith
-
“To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.” -William Hazlitt
-
“He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.” -William Penn
-
“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” -Lin Yutang
View More Quotations – By Author.
View More Quotations – By Topic.
Home.