Wise quotes
5.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Write on your doors the saying wise and old, "Be bold! be bold!" and everywhere - "Be bold; Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less; Better like Hector in the field to die, Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly."
"Wise to resolve, patient to perform."
"Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart."
"Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink."
"Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it."
"A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught."
"Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity-- Early to bed and early to rise Make a man healthy and wealth and wise. As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms."
"It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him."
"We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?"
"Nothing is so dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is worth more. [Fr., Rien n'est si dangereux qu'un ignorant ami; Mieux vaudrait un sage ennemi.]"
"Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred."
"Genealogists live in the past lane."
"Never write a letter while you are angry."
"Tacitus appears to have been as great an enthusiast as Petrarch for the revival of the republic and universal empire. He has exerted the vengeance of history upon the emperors, but has veiled the conspiracies against them, and the incorrigible corruption of the people which probably provoked their most atrocious cruelties. Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people."
"As good government is an empire of laws, how shall your laws be made? In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good."
"Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant."
"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries."
"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."
"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
"In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise."
