Wise quotes
5.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"For a bowl of water give a goodly meal; For a kindly greeting bow thou down with zeal; For a simple penny pay thou back with gold; If thy life be rescued, life do not withhold. Thus the words and actions of the wise regard; Every little service tenfold they reward. But the truly noble know all men as one, And return with gladness good for evil done."
"I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect."
"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."
"Wise travelers always stop short before they come to danger."
"The words of truth are always paradoxical."
"Grace! It's Christmas for goodness sake! Think about the baby Jesus. Up in that tower letting his hair down, so that the three wise men could climb up and spin the dreidel and see if there's six more weeks of winter!"
"John Green is a very handsome, intelligent, and wise man. He smells really weird though."
"Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations."
"When you're doing the work you're meant to do, it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you're getting paid."
"When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are."
"I don't yell at people, I don't mistreat people. I don't talk down to people, so no one else in this building, in this vicinity, has the right to do it."
"I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse."
"It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors."
"Wise it is to comprehend the whole."
"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from."
"There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory."
"There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded."
"It's the primordial characters [of the Star Wars]. It's the beautiful princess and the callow youth and the smartass that I played and the wise old warrior that Alec Guinness played. And it was a fairy tale. It was a fairy tale."
"As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds."
"Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like) ; fletchers bend the arrow ; carpenters bend a log of wood ; wise people fashion themselves."
