Wisdom Quotes
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
G. C. Lichtenberg
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.
Thomas Hobbes
A brief resume of some Wisdom Quotes that may even qualify as being " Central Poetry Insights " now follows:-
- A Disdain for Materialism
-
Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.
Shakespeare - A Distrust of Intellect
- The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!
Wordsworth - A Yearning for Divine Edification
- God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
Yeats - Charity
- That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Wordsworth - Purity of Heart
- A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscience.
Shakespeare - Humility
- The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
Thomas Dekker - Meekness
- Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish her election,
Sh'hath sealed thee for herself, for thou hast been
As one in suff'ring all that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well co-medled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please: give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
Shakespeare
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust
A brief resume of some Pearls of Wisdom that may even qualify as being " Central Spiritual Insights " now follows:~
- A Disdain for Materialism
- Chuang Tzu put on cotton clothes with patches in them, and
arranging his girdle and tying on his shoes,
(i.e. to keep them from falling off),
went to see the prince of Wei.
"How miserable you look, Sir!" Cried the prince. "It is poverty, not misery", replied Chuang Tzu. "A man who has TAO cannot be miserable. Ragged clothes and old boots make poverty, not misery".
Chuang Tzu - (Taoism) - A Distrust of Intellect
- Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; Cleverness is mere
opinion, bewilderment intuition.
Rumi - (Islam) - A Yearning for Divine Edification
- The intelligence of the mean man does not rise beyond bribes and letters of
recommendation. His mind is beclouded with trivialities. Yet he would penetrate the
mystery of TAO and of creation, and rise to participation in the ONE. The result is
that he is confounded by time and space; and that trammelled by objective existences,
that he fails apprehension of that age before anything was.
But the perfect man, - he carries his mind back to the period before the beginning.
Content to rest in the oblivion of nowhere, passing away like flowing water, he is
merged in the clear depths of the infinite.
Chuang Tzu - (Taoism) - Charity
- He that does everything for Me, whose supreme object I am, who
worships Me, being free from attachment and without hatred to any
creature, this man, Arjuna!, comes to Me.
Bhagavad Gita ~ (Hinduism) ~ also known as ~ (Vedanta).
And my soul is absorbed
In the Love of My Lord.
Bow humbly to the saint
That is a pious act.
Bow to the ground before him
That is devotion, indeed.
The faithless know not,
The joy of the love of the Lord;
From Sohila-Arti ~ a bed-time prayer
This section of which is attributed to Guru Ram Das - (Sikhism) - Purity of Heart
- The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more
and more unto the perfect day. The way of the wicked is as
darkness: they know not at what they stumble.
Solomon - (Judaism) - Humility
- Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first
condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
Ansari of Herat - (Islam) - Meekness
- Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good;
let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth!
Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked
for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.
Dhammapada - (Buddhism)
Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.
Bertolt Brecht
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
Cicero
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
Martin Fischer
There is one mind common to all individual men.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. All the facts of history pre-exist as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the manifold world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
From his Essay 'History'
History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
R. G. Collingwood
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.
Immanuel Kant
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
We maintain a page dedicated to a detailed treatment of "Central" Poetry Insights
Several of our pages are dedicated to a detailed treatment of "Central" Spiritual Insights.
These pages are individually concerned with insights from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Sikh and Taoist sources - readers may be surprised at the range of agreement between these major World Religions as to what is "Spiritually Important".