Some of the best lessons we ever learn we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future.

- Tryon Edwards

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)

We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and trasmit data -- the lowest cognitive form -- has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

- Dee Hock

Those who know are wise. Those who know themselves are enlightened.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh....

- Kahlil Gibran

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

- William Butler Yeats

Even in evil, that dark cloud which hangs over the creation, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see in suffering and temptation proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love.

- William Ellery Channing

The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not.

- Bo Lozoff

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

- Albert Einstein

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

- Madame de Stael

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

- Kahlil Gibran

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

- Benjamin Franklin

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

- Heinrich Heine

The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor.

- Benjamin Franklin

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

- Naguib Mahfouz



It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

- Walter Lippmann



Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.

- Buddha



I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

- Abraham Lincoln



Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.

- David Starr Jordan



Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

- Plato



The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

- George Santayana



Strategic planning is worthless -- unless there is first a strategic vision.

- John Naisbitt



Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

- Samuel Johnson



A prudent question is one half of wisdom.

- Francis Bacon



Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

- Thomas Jefferson



Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself.

- Oprah Winfrey



Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

- Baltasar Gracian



A wise person decides slowly but abides by these decisions.

- Arthur Ashe



The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox



He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today.

- Tryon Edwards



I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

- Umberto Eco



We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

- George Bernard Shaw



One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

- Georg C. Lichtenberg



We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

- Samuel Smiles



Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

- Robert Louis Stevenson



A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.

- Henry David Thoreau



I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

- Antonio Gramsci



Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

- Mary Catherine Bateson



Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

- Stephen Covey



Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.

- Austin Dacey



Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

- Wallace Stegner



Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

- William Saroyan



If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.

- Alex Noble



Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher

- Jonathan Kozol