Quotes about Wisdom

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." —ISAIAH 55:8—9 NKJV

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. —PROVERBS 3:5

Look for a star of guidance in your own life, and be willing to follow wherever I lead. I am the Light from on high that dawns upon you, to guide your feet into the way of Peace.

Though the world applauds quick-witted retorts, My instructions about communication are quite different: Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. Ask My Spirit to help you whenever you speak.

Human beings have a voracious appetite for trying to figure things out in order to gain a sense of mastery over their lives.

The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.

The longer you look at the idea that we read the Bible to find new meanings, the sillier it becomes. We read and return to the Bible not (just) to find something new but to hear something old, not to discover something fresh but to be reminded of something ancient.

We can begin to focus on the eternal if we live to love God and others (the Jesus Creed), if we pursue justice as the way we are called to love others as God's creations, if we live out a life that drives for peace as how loving people treat one another, and if we strive for wisdom instead of just knowledge or bounty.

Martin Luther offers a powerful reminder in our temptation to go at life on our own: The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.

Torah is not theoretical morality but lived theology, a life enflamed by knowing God.

These common approaches fail the words of Jesus because in the Sermon Jesus calls his followers to do what he teaches. Those who don't do what he says, in fact, are condemned as foolish.

As Dale Allison correctly points out, "We have here [in the Beatitudes] not commonsense wisdom born of experience but eschatological promise which foresees the unprecedented: the evils of the present will be undone and the righteous will be confirmed with reward."12 This blessing, while its focus is future, begins now (Matt 11:6; 13:16).