Wisdom

Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body.

Mixing one’s wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

It is no doubt a good thing to conquer on the field of battle, but it needs greater wisdom and greater skill to make use of victory.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

No one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.

Passion makes the best observations and draws the most wretched conclusions.

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen. Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us.

Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

An ignorance of means may minister To greatness, but an ignorance of aims Makes it impossible to be great at all.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.