Wisdom Quotes - Page 104

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.

Kindness is the truest wisdom of life and we cannot go far without it.

I believe the gun has no power because a gun can only kill, but a pen can give life.

A little kingdom I possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard the task I find of governing it well.

Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

God made Truth with many doors to welcome every believer who knocks on them.

Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

In the common run of mankind, for one that is wise and good you find ten of a contrary character.

Empty vessels make the most sound.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know - even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction - than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

If you make demands on Him, you doubt Him. If you seek Him, you are absent from Him. If you seek other-than-Him, you are shameless before Him. If you make demands on other-than-Him, you are distant from Him.

The gap between the rich and the poor is the most dangerous threat to world peace we have.

My philosophy has always been that benefits should percolate up rather than trickle down.

To act with common sense according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know.

To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast.

Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things.

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,... I asked myself why I might not be washing some golddaily, though it were only the finest particles,--why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine.... At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that Kelso's theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed "guaranteed income" or "negative income tax."

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!