Wiser Quotes - Page 3

• Randalf the Wise indeed!I've worn wiser pairs of underpants!

  Paul Stewart

  Wise, Pairs, Worn

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• But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.

  Dorothy Parker

  Book, Thinking, Two

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• We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

  Anton Chekhov

  Sweet, Stupid, Nice

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• It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This--" I held out my hands "--this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.

  Louis L'Amour

  Hands, Wish, Stronger

  Louis L'Amour (2014). “The Sacketts Volume One 5-Book Bundle: Sackett's Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, The Warrior's Path, Jubal Sackett, Ride the River”, p.677, Bantam

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• Dolgan: ’Tis a wise thing to know what is wanted, and wiser still to know when ‘tis achieved. Rhuagh: True. And still wiser to know when it is unachievable, for then striving is folly.

  Raymond E. Feist

  Wise, Strive, Folly

  Raymond E. Feist (1986). “Magician, apprentice”, Spectra Books

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• Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

  Graham Greene

  Dumb, Would Be, Literature

  'The Quiet American' (1955) pt. 1, ch. 3

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• The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry.

  Campbell McGrath

  Powerful, Believe, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.

  George S. Clason

  Richest Man In Babylon, Our Thoughts

  George S. Clason (2013). “The Richest Man In Babylon”, p.6, Lulu.com

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• I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.

  Helen Keller

  Beautiful, Angel, Opportunity

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.142, Om Books International

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• He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Reading, Complaining

  Samuel Johnson (1977). “Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.261, Univ of California Press

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• As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

  Margaret Mead

  Travel, Home, Memorable

  "Coming of Age in Samoa". Book by Margaret Mead, 1928.

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• He went like one that hath been stunn'd, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Rose, Morrow

  'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) pt. 7

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• Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Optimistic, Long, Waiting

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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• ...Stop blaming me, thinking I'm the problem. If you think I'm the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that you're the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Thinking, People, World

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• The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

  Steven Johnson

  Art, Mistake, Writing

  Steven Johnson (2010). “Where Good Ideas Come From”, p.156, Penguin

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• Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.

  Booth Tarkington

  Law, Apples, Important

  Newton Booth Tarkington (2015). “The Magnificent Ambersons”, p.42, Booklassic

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• But our love was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we Of many far wiser than we And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Beautiful, Angel, Sea

  Edgar Allan Poe (1912). “The Bells and Other Poems”, p.13, Library of Alexandria

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• The One created us all to be free. To learn. To find common cause with others and to grow stronger and wiser. But the ancient enemy perverts that union of strengths. With the enemy, there is no choice, no freedom. They take. They force a joining of all things, until nothing else remains. --Doroga

  Jim Butcher

  Choices, Enemy, Stronger

  Jim Butcher (2006). “Academ's Fury”, p.144, Penguin

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• One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

  Mark Haddon

  Prayer, Believe, Fall

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• Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

  Sylvia Plath

  Years, Oracles, Thirty

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Colossus: and Other Poems”, p.26, Vintage

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• Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Wedding, Hate

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “De Profundis”, p.24, Courier Corporation

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• ....You should keep dental floss on you at all times; when your eyesight goes, quit driving; don't keep too many secrets, eventually they'll eat away at you. But the most valuable lesson he taught me was this: Every day we get older, and some of us get wiser, but there's no end to our evolution. We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us. And this is what I figured out on my own: Over the course of a lifetime, people change, but not as much as you'd think. Nobody really grows up.

  Lisa Lutz

  Growing Up, Thinking, Dental Floss

  Lisa Lutz (2011). “The Spellmans Strike Again: Document #4”, p.379, Simon and Schuster

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• We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Memories, Light, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• GOING TO WALDEN It isn't very far as highways lie. I might be back by nightfall, having seen The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! Many have gone, and think me half a fool To miss a day away in the cool country. Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

  Mary Oliver

  Country, Lying, Book

  Mary Oliver (1972). “The River Styx, Ohio, and other poems”

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• Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

  Philip Pullman

  Humble, Stronger, Want

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The subtle knife”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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