Quotes on Wisdom

Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve the silence?

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Nothing goes right on the outside when nothing is going right on the inside.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.

If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem.

There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Common sense suits itself to the ways of the world. Wisdom tries to confirm to the ways of heaven.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.