Quotes on Wisdom

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Imagine craving absolutely nothing from the world. Imagine cutting the invisible strings that so painfully bind us: what would that be like? Imagine the freedoms that come from the ability to enjoy things without having to acquire them, own them, possess them. Try to envision a relationship based on acceptance and genuine care rather than expectation. Imagine feeling completely satisfied and content with your life just as it is. Who wouldn't want this? This is the enjoyment of non-attachment.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily.

When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine.

Seclusion is the price of greatness.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.