Wise quotes
5.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple."
"Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words."
"Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them."
"People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange"
"When you visit countries that don't nurture these kinds of ambitions, you can feel th absence of hope...people are reduced to worrying only about that day's shelter or the next day's meal. It's a shame, even a tragedy, how many people do not get to think about the future. Technology coupled with wise leadership not only solves these problems but enables dreams of tomorow."
"Time is the stuff of which life is made."
"In common discourse we denominate persons and things according to the major part of their character; he is to be called a wise man who has but few follies."
"The tall, the wise, the reverend head Must lie as low as ours."
"It's quite a thing, if you've never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They're not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you."
"When you know for yourselves, 'These things are wholesome; these things are blameless; these things are praised by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness,' then you should engage in them."
"One of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through."
"Wise sayings are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered."
"He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.'"
"I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, "Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.""
"There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise."
"There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances."
"Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men, is more lively than that of old; and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely."
"Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to."
"The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise."
"A wise man does nothing by constraint."
