Wisest Quotes - Page 13

• Jed Diamond is, quite simply, one of the wisest men writing today on the topic of male emotional and physical health.

  Michael Gurian

  Writing, Men, Emotional

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• In all human affairs, the wisest course is to be passionate about the role of reason and reasonable about the role of passion.

  Mardy Grothe

  Passion, Roles, Affair

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• [The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.

  Edward Gibbon

  Law, Inspire, Vices

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.372, Wordsworth Editions

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• Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Country, Men

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• The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses.

  Pindar

  Wisdom, Witness, Stills

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• The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to a human. The wisest human will seem like an ape when compared to a god with respect to wisdom, beauty, and everything else.

  Heraclitus

  Beautiful, Wisdom, Respect

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• That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless

  Plato

  Philosophical, Men, Realizing

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong.

  Sophocles

  Wisdom, Men, Wisest Man

  Sophocles (1955). “The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus [and] Antigone”

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• Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.

  Thales

  Good Life, Light, All Things

  "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers". Book by Diogenes Laërtius, I, 35, 1925.

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• It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Freedom, Mean, Individual Effort

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• Time as he grows old teaches many lessons. - Aeschylus Time is the wisest counselor of all.

  Pericles

  Teacher, Time, Lessons

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• Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Art, Men, Universal Life

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “WHAT IS ART? & WHEREIN IS TRUTH IN ART? (Meditations on Aesthetics & Literature): On the Significance of Science and Art, Shakespeare and the Drama, The Works of Guy De Maupassant, A. Stockham'sTokology, Amiel's Diary, S. T. Seménov's Peasant Stories, Stop and Think!...”, p.50, e-artnow

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• All "public interest' legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

  Ayn Rand

  Integrity, Taken, Men

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.161, Penguin

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• No matter the barbs of fate that frustrate you, no matter how stacked against you the cards of fortune. . . . There is a liberating law in the universe, and you can become the highest of the high, wisest of the wise.

  Uell Stanley Andersen

  Wise, Fate, Law

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• I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Dog, Teacher, Cat

  Kurt Vonnegut (1997). “Hocus Pocus”, p.104, Penguin

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• Essentialism is not about how to get more things done, it's about how to the get the right things done. It doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.

  Greg McKeown

  Mean, Order, Energy

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• The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.

  E. O. Wilson

  Independent, Self, Brain

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• The wisest among us is a fool in some things.

  Samuel Richardson

  Wisdom, Fool

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• Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.

  John Ruskin

  Real, Men, Thrones

  John Ruskin (1912). “The fall”

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• Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Purity, Individual, Grammar

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.265, Harvard University Press

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• It is our wisest and our safest course to stand at the farthest distance from sin; not to go near the house of the harlot, but to fly from all appearance of evil (Prov. 5:8, I Thess. 5:22). The best course to prevent falling into the pit is to keep at the greatest distance; he that will be so bold as to attempt to dance upon the brink of the pit, may find by woeful experience that it is a righteous thing with God that he should fall into the pit.

  Thomas Brooks

  Distance, Fall, Sins Not

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• I regard it (the Constitution) as the work of the purest patriots and wisest statesman that ever existed, aided by the smiles of a benign Providence; it almost appears a "Divine interposition in our behalf... the hand that destroys our Constitution rends our Union asunder forever.

  Daniel Webster

  Hands, Forever, Unions

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• Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Wisest Man, Age

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• Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fear, Nice, House

  C. S. Lewis (1952). “Mere Christianity: a revised and enlarged edition, with a new introduction, of the three books, The case for Christianity, Christian behaviour, and Beyond personality”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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• It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.

  George Saintsbury

  Beauty, Drinking, Race

  George Saintsbury (1963). “Notes on a cellar-book”

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