Quotes about Wisdom

In the good days remember also death.

If you attempt what is beyond your power, your trouble will be wasted and you court not only misfortune but ridicule.

A very large Oak was uprooted by the wind, and thrown across a stream. It fell among some Reeds, which it thus addressed: I wonder how you, who are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by these strong winds. They replied: You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we, on the contrary, bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken. Stoop to conquer.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully ) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK.

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

There is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.