Quotes about Wisdom

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth?

Perhaps, if I hadn't been, once before—I mean, if I'd always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end." Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. "I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.