Wisdom

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Wit is educated insolence.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

 

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form—that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility—can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

One would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.

 

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

There's no joy even in beautiful Wisdom, unless one have holy Health.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Genius is nothing but continued attention.