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.
Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley,
The highest excellence is like (that of) water.
The journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness;
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath.
The Soul selects her own Society – / Then – shuts the Door –
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
The unexamined life is not worth living.
The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away
To be great is to be misunderstood.
To be, or not to be, that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them?
To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
We must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.
Work is love made visible.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.