Famous Quotes & Sayings

James Russell Lowell

For only by unlearning Wisdom comes.

James Russell Lowell

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

Laurence Sterne

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

Laurence Sterne

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.

Friedrich August von Hayek

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The barrier to success is not something which exists in the real world; it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Sherwin B. Nuland

The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one's own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

Terence

Moderation in all things.

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so.

In spite of every sage whom Greece can show, Unerring wisdom never dwelt below; Folly in all of every age we see, The only difference lies in the degree.

Nicolas Chamfort

Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a chateau does to its owner.

Nora Roberts

That woman doesn't have the sense God gave a retarded flea.

Nicolaus Copernicus

To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.

Myrtle Reed

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

Myrtle Reed

It seems to take a lifetime for us to learn that wisdom consists largely in a graceful acceptance of things that do not immediately concern us.

Morris West

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

Morris West

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

Morris Raphael Cohen

Wisdom is not to be obtained from textbooks, but must be coined out of human experience in the flame of life.

Mignon McLaughlin

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.

John Ruskin

The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible.

Mortimer Adler

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

Philip Sidney

What doth better become wisdom than to discern what is worthy the living.

Philip Sidney

The glory and increase of wisdom stands in exercising it.

Philip James Bailey

I cannot be content with less than heaven; Living, and comprehensive of all life. Thee, universal heaven, celestial all; Thee, sacrjd seat of intellective time; Field of the soul 's best wisdom : home of truth , Star-throned.

Peggy Noonan

Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping

Paulo Coelho

The world has a soul and whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of many things.