Wisdom Quotes

"I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom"

Wislawa Szymborska, Poet

"In youth and beauty, wisdom is but rare!"

Homer, Poet

"The Divine of the Lord in heaven is love, for the reason that love is receptive of all things of heaven, such as peace, intelligence, wisdom and happiness"

Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist

"The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind"

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Writer

"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, President

"The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it"

Reinhold Niebuhr, Theologian

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other"

Reinhold Niebuhr, Theologian

"Wisdom and deep intelligence require an honest appreciation of mystery"

Thomas Moore, Poet

"Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious"

Zhuangzi, Philosopher

"Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom"

George William Curtis, Author

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness"

Jean Cocteau, Director

"For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom"

John Webster, Playwright

"The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense"

Dean Inge, Philosopher

"I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I or the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom"

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Actress

"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, Novelist

"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, Historian

"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late"

Felix Frankfurter, Judge

"The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it"

William Faulkner, Novelist

"The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom"

James Allen, Author

"He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich"

Evelyn Waugh, Author

"Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense"

Henry Miller, Writer

"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, Soldier

"Wisdom begins at the end"

Daniel Webster, Statesman

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of face within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity"

Calvin Coolidge, President

"There's no way in hell I could have achieved what I have without being a good student and listening to the wisdom of others"

Phil Heath, Athlete

"I'm not a money manager, but I can tell you what the conventional wisdom is. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on"

Maria Bartiromo, Journalist

"The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom"

Herbie Hancock, Musician

"All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people"

James A. Garfield, President

"It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein"

Adam Schiff, Politician

"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, Historian

"In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool"

Lord Chesterfield, Statesman

"Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values"

Sidney Hook, Philosopher

"To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute"

James Buchanan, President

"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, Actor

"Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use"

John Denham, Politician

"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, Artist

"Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom"

Jean Giraudoux, Dramatist

"We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation"

William O. Douglas, Judge

"Any successful nominee should possess both the temperament to interpret the law and the wisdom to do so fairly. The next Supreme Court Justice should have a record of protecting individual rights and a strong willingness to put aside any political agenda"

Bennie Thompson, Politician

"Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life"

Herman Hesse, Author

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