Quotes about Wisdom

But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we'll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever.

Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God's own point of view.

They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.

A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer's own scars may fade away.

Oswald Chambers once said that the Psalms teach you how to pray; Job teaches you how to suffer; the Song of Solomon teaches you how to love; Proverbs teaches you how to live; and Ecclesiastes teaches you how to enjoy.

As a Jewish rabbi put it, A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, 'I am but dust and ashes.' On the other, 'For my sake was the world created.' And he should use each stone as he needs it.7-11

Or we can picture God as a caring parent with traits with love, generosity, and sensitivity- an infinite Being who personally interacts with and responds to creation. Accordingly, God considers prayers much as a wise parent might consider requests from a child.

A God wise enough to rule the universe is wise enough to watch over his child Job, regardless of how things seem in the bleakest moments.

Wise companions learn to seek out the delicate balance between offering help and offering too much help.

To gain the hearing of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus' words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency — ?in short, our lack of grace — ?has proved so damaging that society will no longer look to us for the guidance it needs.

For me, at least, guidance only becomes evident when I look backward, months and years later. Then the circuitous process falls into place and the hand of God seems clear. But at the moment of decision I feel mainly confusion and uncertainty. Indeed, almost all the guidance in my life has been subtle and indirect.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.