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Quotes about wisdom

352 quotes from 209 people

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Accept good advice gracefully⁠—as long as it doesn’t interfere with what you intended to do in the first place.
Gene Brown
- Advice
A word to the wise is infuriating.
Hunter S. Thompson1937–2005
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust1871–1922
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900Bruce Bashford Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1999, p. 68.
- Debate
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900An Ideal Husband (1895)
- Advice
It is only by prudence, wisdom, and dexterity, that great ends are attained and obstacles overcome. Without these qualities nothing succeeds.
Napoleon1769–1821Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
- Success
The wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him.
Aristotle384–322 BCMetaphysics, 982a.15, W. Ross, trans., The Basic Works of Aristotle (2001), p. 691.
That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results.
Aristotle384–322 BCMetaphysics, 982a16, Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 1554
- Knowledge
Never take anything for granted.
Benjamin Disraeli1804–1881Speech at Salthill (5 October 1864)
- Advice
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.
Clarence Darrow1857–1938Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
- Anti-Religion
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Walden (1854)In context
- Money
He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784The Idler (1758–1760), No. 57 (19 May 1759)
- Risk
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Part I, Chapter 4
- Philosophy
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
- Liberty
- Virtue
We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.
Helen Keller1880–1968The Five-sensed World (1910)
- Courage