Wisest Quotes - Page 10

• It is not the bee's touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.

  Thomas Brooks

  Christian, Sweet, Peace

  Thomas Brooks (1810). “Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices: Being a Companion for Christians of All Denominations”, p.8

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• [I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing... it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

  Homer

  Wine, Men, Wisest Man

  Homer (1997). “The Odyssey”, p.481, Penguin

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• We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was skeptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. This is the true scientific spirit.

  Karl Popper

  Mean, Men, Wisest Man

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• The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.

  Jane Austen

  Men, May, Firsts

  Jane Austen (1853). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.49

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• The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.

  Dante Alighieri

  Time, Growing Up, Loss

  "Divine Comedy". Poem by Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio, Song III, 78, 1321.

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• Even the wisest counsel is useless when it is unheeded.

  Francine Mathews

  Useless

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• The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Ideas, People, Important

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• Being our Self is the wisest philosophy, the bravest action, the kindest consideration and the greatest act of healing imaginable.

  Robert Holden

  Philosophy, Healing, Self

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• Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Life, Mean, Heart

  FaceBook post by Karen Marie Moning from Mar 20, 2014

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• There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Plato, Greatness, Men

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal Truths”, p.87

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• The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Cost, Littles, Virtue

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• We have all our playthings. Happy are they who are contented with those they can obtain; those hours are spent in the wisest manner that can easiest shade the ills of life, and are the least productive of ill consequences.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Shade, Hours, Ill

  Mary Wortley Montagu, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe (1837). “The Letters and Works: In Three Volumes”, p.147

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• The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Errors, Wisest Man

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.61

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• Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

  James Russell Lowell

  Reading, Mean, Eye

  James Russell Lowell (1887). “Democracy and other Addresses”

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• Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

  Charles Lamb

  Children, Heart, Childhood

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• Mountain gorses, do ye teach us
  . . . .
  That the wisest word man reaches
  Is the humblest he can speak?

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Men, Mountain, Speak

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1871). “Poetical Works”, p.102

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• Oh, popular applause! what heart of man
  Is proof against thy sweet seducing charms?
  The wisest and the best feel urgent need
  Of all their caution in thy gentlest gales;
  But swell'd into a gust--who then, alas!
  With all his canvas set, and inexpert,
  And therefore, heedless, can withstand thy power?

  William Cowper

  Sweet, Heart, Men

  William Cowper, James Sambrook (2016). “William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems”, p.100, Routledge

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• There was a time when I believed in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending. Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion.

  Robert Southey

  Men, House, Physicians

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• Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  School, Elephants, Differences

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)”, p.3103, Delphi Classics

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• Even the wisest man grows tense
  With some sort of violence
  Before he can accomplish fate,
  Know his work or choose his mate.
  
  Poet and sculptor, do the work,
  Nor let the modish painter shirk

  William Butler Yeats

  Wisdom, Art, Fate

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.334, Simon and Schuster

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• In a movie we try to deceive. In theaters, as they say, the deceived are the wisest.

  Casey Affleck

  Trying, Deceiving, Theater

  "Roger Ebert still has questions for Casey Affleck". www.interviewmagazine.com. September 22, 2010.

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• My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Daughter, Fathers Day, Country

  Sarah Orne Jewett (2005). “The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Selected Short Fiction”, Barnes & Noble

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• The wisest thing to do if you’re living in hell is to make yourself comfortable.

  Charles Bukowski

  Hell, Things To Do, Ifs

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• When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Spiritual, Clever, Men

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• The wisest among us - the genuine leaders - smile in the face of adversity.

  Robin Sharma

  Leadership, Adversity, Faces

  Robin Sharma (2016). “The Robin Sharma Pack”, p.39, Jaico Publishing House

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