Wisdom Quotes

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have right that these wants should be provided for, including the want of a sufficient restraint upon their passions.
Edmund Burke
It is the province of knowledge to speak, It is the privledge of wisdom to listen.
Christine Lane
Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
Dee W. Hock, Fast Company
Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.
Baltasar Gracian
I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sir john harington - books give not wisdome where none was before, but...
Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop Than when we soar.
William Wordsworth
Joey adams - many a crown of wisdom is but the golden...
Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.
Sir Arthur Eddington, Attributed in Robert L. Weber "More Random Walks in Science", 1982
Whosover loveth wisdom is righteous, but he that keepeth company with fowl is weird.
Woody Allen, "Without Feathers".
Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.
Thomas Jefferson
The study of history is the beginning of political wisdom.
Jean Bodin
Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.
Cato the Elde
I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.
John Buchan
A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - From Live Without Principle.
Henry David Thoreau
The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
Pierre Abelard
T. s. eliot - where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge...
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Felix Frankfurte
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Reinhold Niebuhr, in a sermon in 1943
I sit beside my lonely fire and pray for wisdom yet for calmness to remember or courage to forget.
Charles Hamilton Aide
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.
Mark Twain
Our government sprang from and was made for the people - - Not the people for the government. To them it owes an allegiance from them it must derive its courage, strength, and wisdom.
Andrew Johnson
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone? The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
Lin Yutang, O Magazine, October 2002
Wisdom oft lurks beneath a tattered coat.
Caecilius Statius
A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.
Henry David Thoreau
The doors of wisdom are never shut.
Benjamin Franklin
From the persistence of noise comes the insistence of rage. From the emergence of tone comes the divergence of thought. From the enlightenment of music comes the wisdom of... silence.
Visions of Gregorian Chants
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, not even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
Henry David Thoreau
The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.
Hal Borland
Above all, we must abolish hope in the heart of man. A calm despair, without angry convulsions, without reproaches to Heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
Alfred Victor Vigny
The extreme limit of wisdom - - That is what the public calls madness.
Jean Cocteau
Cleverness is like a lens with a very sharp focus. Wisdom is more like a wide - Angle lens.
Edward de Bono, Textbook of Wisdom
Wisdom outweighs any wealth.
Sophocles, Antigone
A prudent question is one - Half of wisdom.
Francis Bacon
He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.
Mary Howitt
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
Stephen Vincent Benet, Litany for Dictatorships, 1935
The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.
Albert Einstein
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
Jimi Hendrix