Quotes About Wise

I was born wise. Street-wise, people-wise, self-wise. This wisdom was my birthright.

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.

O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!

To be wise use three languages: think well, feel well and do well. And to be wise allow yourselves to be surprised by the love of God. That will guarantee a good life.

Before us lie two paths - honesty and dishonesty. The shortsighted embark on the dishonest path; the wise on the honest. For the wise know the truth; in helping others we help ourselves; and in hurting others we hurt ourselves. Character overshadows money, and trust rises above fame. Honesty is still the best policy.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

It was observed of Elizabeth that she was weak herself, but chose wise counsellors; to which it was replied, that to choose wise counsellors was, in a prince, the highest wisdom.

That man is best who sees the truth himself. Good too is he who listens to wise counsel. But who is neither wise himself nor willing to ponder wisdom is not worth a straw.

Wise people listen to wise instruction, especially instruction from the Word of God.

Wise is what you want to be. Smart is easy compared to wise.

Praise of power leads to weakness; Love of things leads to loss; The wise one leads by filling people's hearts; He destroys illusion and disturbs those who believe they are wise; He does nothing yet everything happens.

We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become politicians; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly out-numbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.

Do not be wise in words - be wise in deeds.

True words aren't eloquent; eloquent words aren't true. Wise men don't need to prove their point; men who need to prove their point aren't wise. The Master has no possessions. The more he does for others, the happier he is. The more he gives to others, the wealthier he is. The Tao nourishes by not forcing. By not dominating, the Master leads.

It is commonly, but erroneously, believed that it is easy to ask questions. A fool, it is said, can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. The fact is that a wise man can answer many questions that a fool cannot ask.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges.

If you are wise, be wise; keep what goods the gods provide you.

If it was wise, manly, and patriotic for us to establish a free government, it is equally wise to attend to the necessary means of its preservation.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.

Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.

Someone has to make the final decision, but the wise leader gathers information and seeks counsel - after deciding who among those surrounding him provides consistently wise advice - before making that final decision.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

It is necessary to have party organization if we are to have effective and efficient government. The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization, and the only difference between a disorganized country and one that has the advantage of a wise and sound government is fundamentally a question of organization.

Man pays deference to woman instinctively, involuntarily, not because she is beautiful or truthful or wise or foolish or proper, but because she is a woman, and he cannot help it. If she descends, he will lower to her level; if she rises, he will rise to her height.

Like most trends, at the beginning it's driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

A good man and a wise man may at times be angry with the world, at times grieved for it; but be sure no man was ever discontented with the world who did his duty in it.

If the infinite had not desired man to be wise, he would not have bestowed upon him the faculty of knowing.

But if you'll prosper, mark what I advise, Whom age, and long experience render wise.

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

It is never too late to be wise.

Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.

I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

Never try to sell at the top. It isn't wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.

Love makes you wise. Love unites. Pain divides. Hate divides even more. Hate separates and brings us down to a very physical plane. Love elevates us to a plane of spirit.

Be as soft as possible, if something good and wise wants to shape you; be as hard as possible, if something bad and foolish wants to shape you!

SAGE. A wise and Holy man who died a long time ago. No one modern qualifies.

Nothing is so convenient as a decisive argument ... which must at least silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, and free us from their impertinent solicitations. I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument ... which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane.

It seems then, say I, that you leave politics entirely out of the question, and never suppose, that a wise magistrate can justly be jealous of certain tenets of philosophy, such as those of Epicurus, which, denying a divine existence, and consequently a providence and a future state, seem to loosen, in a great measure, the ties of morality, and may be supposed, for that reason, pernicious to the peace of civil society.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

If you are wise you won't be deceived by the innocent airs of those whom you have once found to be dangerous.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

Grudges are like hand grenades: it is wise to release them before they destroy you.

A wise traveller never despises his own country.

The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise.