Words Of Wisdom quotes
270 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them."
"He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing."
"..all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. .... Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses."
"The supposition that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit."
"I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished."
"When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself."
"When we have done our very, very best, papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others."
"Stranger, pause and ask thyself the question, Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire."
"Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him."
"My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight."
"Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it."
"No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die."
"Accidents will occur in the best regulated families."
"Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such."
"The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom."
"Demonstration is also something necessary, because a demonstration cannot go otherwise than it does, ... And the cause of this lies with the primary premises/principles."
"... the science we are after is not about mathematicals either none of them, you see, is separable."
"It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge?"
"...The entire preoccupation of the physicist is with things that contain within themselves a principle of movement and rest."
"Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them."
