Wise Quotes

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.

The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God's creation and... therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating, like the product of any good engineer.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.

They're mutually incompatible I feel; being a wise thief and a wise father.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

Today, certain people file for bankruptcy, businesses and individuals, and it no longer has the stigma it once had. Now it's almost considered wise, a way to regroup and come back again.

I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as "a wise Latina" trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Yet with great toil all that I can attain by long experience, and in learned schools, is for to know my knowledge is but vain, and those that think them wise, are greatest fools.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

He was a wise man who invented beer.