Wisdom quotes
Quotations about wisdom, from Confucius, Lao Tzu and Plato to Montaigne, Emerson and Jane Austen. Wisdom is the theme that attracts the most invented attributions, so each entry names its earliest verifiable source and, where it is a translation, the translator whose wording we use.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness;
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
All warfare is based on deception.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Call to mind from whence we sprang: / Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes / But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
But, dost thou love life? then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,
Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God;
Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.
Good fences make good neighbors.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.
How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may be just and pure.
Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I can resist everything except temptation.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
I was angry with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I would always rather be happy than dignified.
If it is not right, do not do it: if it is not true, do not say it.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?
Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?
Remember that it is not he who reviles you or strikes you, who insults you, but it is your opinion about these things as being insulting.
Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough, always proves little enough.
Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject.
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Nine-tenths of wisdom is to be wise in time, and at the right time;
No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
Nothing to be done.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity:
Real joy, believe me, is a stern matter.
Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.
Remember that thou art an actor in a play, of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose; if short, of a short one; if long, of a long one:
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.
Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend / The wondrous architecture of the world, / And measure every wandering planet’s course, / Still climbing after knowledge infinite,