Famous Quotes & Sayings

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Joy and sorrow are the light and shade of life; without light and shade no picture is clear.

Henry David Thoreau

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

Henry David Thoreau

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Plautus

It is wisdom to think upon anything before we execute it.

Plautus

He is happy in his wisdom who has learned at another's expense.

Plautus

He gains wisdom in a happy way, who gains it by another's experience. [Lat., Feliciter sapit qui alieno periculo sapit.]

Plautus

Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.

Plautus

Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.

Plato

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom -- to know what is known and what is unknown to us?

Plato

Wisdom always makes men fortunate: for by wisdom no man could ever err, and therefore he must act rightly and succeed, or his wisdom would be wisdom no longer.

Plato

They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.

Plato

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Plato

Thinking is the soul talking to itself.

Philip Larkin

Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.

Martin Seligman

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.

Leonardo da Vinci

If you put on more garments, the cold cannot reach you. Similarly, increase your patience and concentration and even great injuries cannot vex your mind.

Lance Henriksen

We are all guilty in someone's eyes. More so our own.

John Updike

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

John Updike

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

John Ray

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.

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.