Wisdom Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

Felix Frankfurter

Putting is like wisdom - partly a natural gift and partly the accumulation of experience.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldst have it, to fear and suspect the worst.

Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.

Elizabeth Gaskell

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

Stephen Vincent Benét

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Marilyn vos Savant

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation.

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

John Henry Newman

We do not want our world to perish. But in our quest for knowledge, century by century, we have placed all our trust in a cold, impartial intellect which only brings us nearer to destruction. We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance. Only by learning to love one another can our world be saved. Only love can conquer all.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

Thomas J. Watson

And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

David Starr Jordan

Every evil is some good spelt backwards, and in it the wise know how to read Wisdom.

Coventry Patmore

The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Walter Lippmann

But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue forever, and never have an end.