Wisest Man Quotes - Page 2

• The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.

  Leo Strauss

  Men, Past, Play

  Leo Strauss (1995). “Liberalism Ancient and Modern”, p.8, University of Chicago Press

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• The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Wisdom, Men, Doe

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• A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Wise, Men, Neighbor

  Taylor Caldwell (2017). “The Devil's Advocate: The Epic Novel of One Man's Fight to Save America from Tyranny”, p.292, Open Road Media

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• Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Passion, Men, Giving

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• The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Men, Judging, Labels

  Karen Marie Moning (2016). “The Fever Series 7-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever, Iced, Burned”, p.408, Dell

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

  Sophocles

  Wisdom, Men, Intelligence

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

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• Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Character, Men, Presidential

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.77, Oxford University Press

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• To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Squares, Vision

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.302, CUP Archive

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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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• Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Wisdom, Men, Fool

  "Pome by Alfred Lord Tennyson". Poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1886.

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• Haste is productive of injury, and so is too much hesitation. He is the wisest man who does everything at the proper time.

  Ovid

  Men, Too Much, Haste

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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, Yesterday

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

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• The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.

  Jose Saramago

  Morning, Writing, Men

  "Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, winner of 1998 Nobel, dies". www.cnn.com. June 18, 2010.

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• The wisdom of God exceeds that of the wisest man, more than his wisdom exceeds that of a child. If a child were to conjecture how an army is to be formed in the day of battle--how a city is to be fortified, or a state governed--what chance has he to guess right? As little chance has the wisest man when he pretends to conjecture how the planets move in their courses, how the sea ebbs and flows, and how our minds act upon our bodies.

  Thomas Reid

  Children, Moving, Army

  Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, Harry M. Bracken, Thomas Reid, Sir William Hamilton (1967). “Philosophical Works”, p.235, Georg Olms Verlag

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• If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Men, Hands, Would Be

  Sinclair Lewis (2002). “Arrowsmith: Elmer Gantry ; Dodsworth”

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• You must not talk about 'ain't and can't' when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

  Charles Kingsley

  Nature, Children, Ocean

  Charles Kingsley (1864). “The Water-babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-baby”, p.66

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• The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Men, Whole Life

  "How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice". Jose Saramago's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 7, 1998.

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• The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I’m left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can’t quite remember.

  George Carlin

  Wise, Wisdom, Memories

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• The wisest men follow their own direction.

  Euripides

  Inspirational, Wise, Hard Work

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1959). “The complete Greek tragedies”

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• Remember that the greatest fool in the world may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Men, Answers, World

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Age, Existentialism

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• The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Would Be, Harmony

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2011). “The Will to Power”, p.225, Vintage

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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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• [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, Dancing

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

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• There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.

  Aristotle

  Funny, Humor, Humility

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