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Quotes about wisdom

352 quotes from 209 people

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How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to Paul Ehrenfest, early December 1914. Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8, Doc. 39. Quoted in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 3
- Virtue
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
George Eliot1819–1880The Mill on the Floss (1860)In context
In the vain laughter of folly, wisdom hears half its applause.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot1888–1965Choruses from The Rock (1934), I
- Knowledge
Don’t start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don’t. They’ll make you look like chopped liver.
Harlan Ellison1934–2018IguanaCon Guest of Honor speech, Phoenix, Arizona, (1978)
- Advice
- Debate
Life is a festival only to the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
- Life & Death
The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Essays
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another’s dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Literary Ethics (1838)
- Advice
- Thinking
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882The Method of Nature (1841), p. 25
- Love
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Self-Reliance (1841)In context
- Character
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Self-Reliance (1841)In context
- Thinking
Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.
Epicurus342–270 BC“Letter to Menoeceus”, as translated in Stoic and Epicurean (1910) by Robert Drew Hicks, p. 167
- Age
Man’s most valuable trait
is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
Euripides481–407 BCHelen, ll. 1617–1618 (tr. Richmond Lattimore, 1956)
Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven — of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best.
Euripides481–407 BCThe Bacchae, ll. 1150-1152 (tr. William Arrowsmith, 1958)
- Virtue