WORDS OF WISDOM

"The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations."
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
English prime minister

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Quotes Pertaining to Wisdom

Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise.
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
Scottish novelist, surgeon

There is somebody wiser than any of us, and that is everybody.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
emperor of the French

Every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from which it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors.
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
English clergyman, writer

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Bible, Psalms

Truth from his lips prevailed with
double sway,
And fools, who came to scoff,
remained to pray.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774)
Anglo-Irish author

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
American writer, physician

Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
American essayist, poet, philosopher

Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.
Emil Nolde (1867-1956)
German painter

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban (b. 1915)
Israeli politician

Many a crown of wisdom is but the golden chamberpot of success, worn with pompous dignity.
Paul Eldridge (b. 1888)
American writer

He who is only wise lives a sad life.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
French writer

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.
François - Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
French writer, moralist

So wise so young, they say, do never live long.
Gloucester, King Richard III
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
English dramatist, poet

It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience.
Roger Ascham (1515-1568)
English writer, classical scholar

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
American author

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
British novelist, scholar

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake (1757-1827)
English poet, artist

Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
American author

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
Joseph Roux (1834-1886)
French priest and writer

How can he get wisdom . . . whose talk is of bullocks?
Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
English novelist

We were deceived by the wisdom of the serpent, but we are freed by the foolishness of God.
Saint Augustine (354-430)
theologian

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English author, lexicographer

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
Graham Greene (b. 1904)
British novelist

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Irish philosopher, statesman

A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.
Lord John Russell (1792-1878)
English statesman, prime minister

A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863)
French poet, novelist, dramatist

And what, in a mean man, I should call folly, is in your majesty remarkable wisdom.
Philip Massinger (1583-1640)
English dramatist

It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths
which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
English clergyman, writer

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