Wisdom Quotes

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Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Thomas Jefferson

It is only by prudence, wisdom, and dexterity, that great ends are attained and obstacles overcome. Without these qualities nothing succeeds.

Napoleon I of France

The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty.... Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

Simone de Beauvoir

Where roads are made I lose my way.In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

Rabindranath Tagore

When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views.

Benjamin Franklin

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth; And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.

William Shakespeare

Wisdom and fortune combating together,
If that the former dare but what it can,
No chance may shake it.

William Shakespeare

Some books we read, tho' few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit.

Benjamin Franklin

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive - so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind - men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others - men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.

Thomas Jefferson

Integral wisdom involves a direct participation in every moment: the observer and the observed are dissolved in the light of pure awareness, and no mental concepts or attitudes are present to dim that light.

Perfection in wisdom, as well as in integrity, is neither required nor expected in these agents (public servants). It belongs not to man. The wise know too well their weaknesses to assume infallibility; and he who knows most, knows best how little he knows.

Thomas Jefferson

Economy has frequently nothing whatever to do with the amount of money being spent, but with the wisdom used in spending it.

But when returning into herself she [the soul] reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

Arthur Schopenhauer

And will he who is a true lover of wisdom, and is persuaded in like manner that only in the world below can he worthily enjoy her, still repine at death? Will he not depart with joy? Surely he will, my friend, if he be a true philosopher.... And if this be true, he would be very absurd,... if he were to fear death.

Doubtless, we are as slow to conceive of Paradise as of Heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. We see how past ages have loitered and erred. "Is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? Have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?" Undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.

Henry David Thoreau

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

And let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once! And let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.