Quotes on Wisdom

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

God helps them that help themselves.

Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming -- in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you -- means a loss of opportunity for some other task.

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.

The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.

There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

Conscience is God present in man.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.