Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marcel Proust

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Joseph Addison

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

Jose Bergamin

To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.

Jonathan Swift

Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.

Jonathan Swift

Many a truth is told in jest.

Kevin Spacey

In recent years we've seen an explosion of creative programming, and I think it represents a third golden age of television because the creators have more control over the story. The audience doesn't care about the platform. They care about the content.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It would not be worth your while to reach the age of seventy if all the wisdom of the world were to be foolishness before God.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wisdom is only found in truth. [Ger., Die Weisheit ist nur in der Wahrheit.]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Willing is not enough, we must do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, power and grace.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wisdom is found only in truth.

James Truslow Adams

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behaves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

James Surowiecki

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.

James Surowiecki

The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.

Norman Vincent Peale

God never made anyone else exactly like you, and he never will again. Thank him for yourself and then for all the rest of his glorious handiwork.

Epictetus

From now on practice saying to everything that appears unpleasant: You are merely an appearance and NOT what you appear to be.

Epictetus

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.

Hermann Hesse

I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.

Hermann Hesse

I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

Hermann Hesse

Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ripe in wisdom was he, but patient, and simple, and childlike.

Hilaire Belloc

Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.

Heraclitus

Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things.

Heraclitus

Of all whose words I have heard, no one attains to this, to know that wisdom is apart from all.

Heraclitus

Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.

Heraclitus

Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeated all things.

Heraclitus

Wisdom is one thing, to know how to make true judgment, how all things are steered through all things.

Henry Ward Beecher

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Wisdom is the repose of the mind.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.