The following inspirational quotes are about wisdom and the seeking of wisdom.
- “Much wisdom often goes with brevity of speech.” -- Sophocles
- “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” -- Confucius
- “Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.” -- Aesop
- “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” -- Aeschylus
- “To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish.” -- Euripides
- “There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.” -- Democritus
- “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” -- Lao-Tzu
- “Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.” -- Cato
- “And in knowing that you know nothing, makes you the smartest of all.” -- Socrates
- “Wisdom is the daughter of experience.” -- Leonardo da Vinci
- “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” -- Francis Bacon
- “It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.” -- Carl von Clausewitz
- “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” -- David Hume
- “A wise man will desire no more than what he may get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.” -- Benjamin Franklin
- “He is a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom.” -- Benjamin Franklin
- “To keep your secret is wisdom; to expect others to keep it is folly.” -- Samuel Johnson
- “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.” -- Anne Bradstreet
- “Wisdom, properly so called, is nothing else but this: the perfect knowledge of the truth in all matters whatsoever.” -- Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
British philosopher. From the dedication, in De Cive (1642) - “Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.” -- Francis Hutcheson
Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, I. v. - “Be humble, if thou would'st attain to Wisdom. Be humbler still, when Wisdom thou hast mastered.” -- Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
- “To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.” -- Robert Louis Stevenson
- “It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.” -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- “In our age... men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering.” -- T.S. Eliot
- “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers.” -- Alfred Tennyson
- “Our life is frittered away by detail.... Simplify, simplify.” -- Henry David Thoreau
- “Re-examine all you have been told . . . Dismiss what insults your Soul.” -- Walt Whitman
- “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” -- Immanuel Kant
- “The fool wonders, the wise man asks.” -- Benjamin Disraeli
- “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it— and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again— and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” -- Mark Twain
- “Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.” -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.” -- George Santayana
American philosopher, essayist. Reason in Religion, Ch. 2 (1945) - “A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable.” -- Admiral Richard E. Byrd
- “A man with wisdom is better off than a stupid man with any amount of charms and superstition.” -- Feras Yaghmour
- “Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” -- Lin Yutang
- “Information isn't wisdom. Information isn't learning. If information were learning, you could be educated by memorizing the world almanac. If you did that, you wouldn't be educated. You'd be weird.” -- David McCullough
- “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” -- Walter Lippman
- “It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it, and appropriately act on it.” -- Stephen Covey
- “Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.” -- Will Durant
- “Some folks are wise and some otherwise.” -- Josh Billings
- “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” -- Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988 - “The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” -- Claude Levi-Strauss
- “The wisest mind has something yet to learn.” -- George Santayana
- “Wisdom is founded on memory; happiness on forgetfulness.” -- Mason Cooley (1927-2002)
U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection (1989) - “Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning...and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.” -- Bergen Evans
- “Wisdom is the constant questioning of where you are. And when you stop wanting to know, you're dead.” -- Billy Connolly
Daily Express, 29th October 2008 - “A man may be born to wealth, but wisdom comes only with length of days.” -- Anon
- “Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone.” -- Anon
- “Knowledge cuts up the world. Wisdom makes it whole.” -- Brazilian proverb
- “Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse.” -- Anon
If you've enjoyed what you've read so far, you'll certainly enjoy my big-picture thinking in the booklet The 2012 Manifesto. You can read more about it here or just click on the big-ass Download button below and I'll take you straight to the download page.
I am a global roamer, soul-searcher, contrarian who has challenged the norm since 1975. My goal is to connect with other world-changers to help make sense of life in an increasingly senseless world. 
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