Quotes About Wisdom

114 quotes

Nietzsche claims to look down because he is exalted, which makes wisdom a matter of altitude rather than humility. Confucius offers a simpler account: the wise never doubt.

Washington draws on experience to say that preventing an enemy from posting themselves is much easier than dislodging them once they hold the ground. Machiavelli defines prudence as knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage and accepting the lesser evil.

Picasso says it takes a very long time to become young, which treats wisdom as a slow return toward an earlier self. King frames it as refusal: let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Shakespeare says only that his soul is in the sky. Dickens locates the wisdom of our ancestors in the simile, so the old insights sit inside plain comparisons.

Each writer seizes one corner of the idea, from field tactics to the soul's height, and the whole reads like a quarrel nobody asked to start.
Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

— The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose

English author

Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched...

— Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

...Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven.

— Les Misérables

Russian novelist

He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

— Crime and Punishment

English novelist and social critic

[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

— A Christmas Carol

British writer and journalist

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

— Animal Farm

English writer and philologist

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

— The Fellowship of the Ring

French novelist, critic and essayist

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.

— Swann's Way

American author and journalist

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

— A Farewell to Arms

French writer, historian and philosopher

Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules, Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.

— Candide and The Maid of Orleans

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.

— Siddhartha

4th-century BCE Greek philosopher

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

— Theaetetus

Greek philosopher

The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. 1153a 23

— The Nicomachean Ethics

American Baptist minister and civil rights leader

Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.

— A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Iranian poet

Knowledge that is acquiredis not like this. Those who have it worry ifaudiences like it or not. It's a bait for popularity. Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul...The only real customer is God. Chew quietlyyour sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stayplayfully childish.

— The Essential Rumi

US-British poet

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

— Four Quartets