Wisdom Quotes

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Coleridge.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

H.W.Beecher.

Wisdom is the name God gives to religion, so telling the world what it will hardly believe, that the two great things which so engross the desire and designs of both the nobler and ignobler sort of mankind, are to be found in religion, viz; wisdom and pleasure, and that the former is the direct way to the latter, as religion is to both.

South.

The Delphic oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.

Socrates.

He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge who knows who has written and where it is to be found.

A.A.Hodge.

There is one person that is wiser than anybody, and that is everybody.

Talleyrand.

Wisdom for a man’s self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing; it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house some time before it fall; it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger who digged and made room for him; it is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

Bacon.

Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master.

Ben Jonson.

You read of but one wise man, and all that he knew was that he knew nothing.

Congreve.

What is it to be wise? Tis but to know how little can be known to see all others faults and feel our own.

Pope.

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

Sophocles.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Spurgeon.

The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.

Carlyle.

It may be said almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter, it is deceptive.

Whately.

Wisdom is to the mind what health is to the body.

Rochefoucauld.

In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom; but he who reflects not, never reaps; has no harvest from it, but carries the burden of age without the wages of experience; nor knows himself old, but from his infirmities, the parish register, and the contempt of mankind. And age, if it has not esteem, has nothing.

Young.

Our chief wisdom consists in knowing our follies and faults, that we may correct them.

True wisdom is a thing very extraordinary. Happy are they that have it; and nest to them, not the many that think they have it, but the few that are sensible of their own defects and imperfections ,and know that they have it not.

Tillotson.

It is as great a point of wisdom to hide ignorance as to discover knowledge, to know what we do not know, as what we do.

God gives men wisdom as he gives them gold; his treasure house is not the mint, but the mine.

A wise man’s day is worth a fool’s life.

Arobic.

The wise man has his foibles, as well as the fool. But the difference between them is ,that the foibles of the one are known to himself and concealed from the world; and the foibles of the other are known to the world and concealed from himself.

J.Mason.

It is too often seen, that the wiser men are about the things of this world, the less wise they are about the things of the next.

Gibson.