Wise Quotes

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

~ Alan Alda

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

~ Sun Tzu

Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.

~ Annie Besant

The intellect of the wise is like glass it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

~ Augustus Hare

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.

~ Joseph Story

Wise thinkers prevail everywhere.

~ Sophocles

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

~ Harold Pinter

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

~ Krista Tippett

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

~ Bruce Lee

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.

~ Isaac Asimov

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere.

~ Calvin Trillin

'The Others' books take place in an alternate Earth where the Earth natives have been the dominant predators throughout the world's history, and humans are nowhere near the top of the food chain. But humans are clever and resilient, if not always wise, and have made some bargains with the Others in order to survive.

~ Anne Bishop

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

~ Voltaire

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men... We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

~ Maya Angelou

Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.

~ Florence Nightingale

Thinking well to be wise: planning well, wiser: doing well wisest and best of all.

~ Malcolm Forbes

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.

~ Euripides

It is best for the wise man not to seem wise.

~ Aeschylus

Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.

~ Antonin Scalia

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

~ Euripides

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

~ Akhenaton

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

~ Will Durant

The man who has sufficient power over himself to wait until his nature has recovered its even balance is the truly wise man, but such beings are seldom met with.

~ Giacomo Casanova

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.

~ William Godwin

No man was ever wise by chance.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A wise man turns chance into good fortune.

~ Thomas Fuller

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Luck can be assisted. It is not all chance with the wise.

~ Baltasar Gracián

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair the rest is in the hands of God.

~ George Washington

He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

~ Euripides

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

~ Charles Spurgeon

Knowledge is the treasure of a wise man.

~ William Penn

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

~ Chanakya

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

~ Samuel Johnson