He is oft the wisest man
Who is not wise at all. [ Wordsworth ]
Time is the wisest counsellor. [ Pericles ]
Nature hath made nothing so base but can
Read some instruction to the wisest man. [ Aleyn ]
Among mortals second thoughts are wisest. [ Euripides ]
The wisest, happiest of our kind are they
That ever walk content with Nature's way. [ Wordsworth ]
The public is wiser than the wisest critic. [ Bancroft ]
Socrates
Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced,
Wisest of men. [ Milton ]
The greatest clerks are not the wisest men. [ Proverb ]
Ornament is but the gilded shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian; beauty, in a word.
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest. [ William Shakespeare ]
The greater scholars are not the wisest men. [ Proverb ]
Among mortals second thoughts are the wisest. [ Euripides ]
The wisest among us is a fool in some things. [ Richardson ]
The wisest men are wise to the full in death. [ John Ruskin ]
If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind;
Or, ravished with the whistling of a name,
See Cromwell, damned to everlasting fame! [ Pope ]
The wisest truly is, in these times, the greatest. [ Carlyle ]
The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time. [ Dante ]
The praise of a fool is incense to the wisest of us. [ Earl of Beaconsfield ]
The spell is thine that reaches
The heart, and makes the wisest head its sport;
And there's one rare, strange virtue in thy speeches,
The secret of their mastery - they are short. [ Halleck ]
Certainly the greatest scholars are not the wisest men. [ Regnier ]
Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool. [ Tennyson ]
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men. [ Anonymous ]
The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so. [ Boileau ]
The wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant. [ J. Petit-Senn ]
The wisest at most observe only how fate leads them, and are content. [ Foster ]
The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest. [ Emmons ]
Let me embrace these sour adversities, for wise men say it is the wisest course. [ Shakespeare ]
First resolutions are not always the wisest, but they are usually the most honest. [ Lessing ]
The wisest know at highest only how destiny is leading them, and are therewith content. [ Forster ]
Nature has planted passions in the heart of man for the wisest purposes both of religion and life. [ Fox ]
It is a powerful sex; they were too strong for the first, the strongest, and the wisest man that was. [ Howell ]
With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. [ Thoreau ]
The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
Unless the people can be kept in total darkness, it is the wisest way for the advocates of truth to give them full light. [ Whately ]
Talk not to me of the wisdom of women, - I know my own sex well; the wisest of us all are but little less foolish than the rest. [ Mary, Queen of Scots ]
Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and good and dwell as little as possible on the dark and the base. [ Cecil ]
There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool. [ Bacon ]
The heart will commonly govern the head, and it is certain that any strong passion, set the wrong way, will soon infatuate even the wisest of men, therefore the first part of wisdom is to watch the affections. [ Dr. Waterland ]
The wisest of us must, for by far the most part, judge like the simplest; estimate importance by mere magnitude, and expect that which strongly affects our own generation, will strongly affect those that are to follow. [ Carlyle ]
Socrates was pronounced by the oracle of Delphos to be the wisest man in Greece, which he would turn from himself ironically, saying there could be nothing in him to verify the oracle, except this, that he was not wise and knew it, and others were not wise and knew it not. [ Bacon ]
Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression. [ J. Beaumont ]
Facts are to the mind the same thing as food to the body. On the due digestion of facts depends the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigour and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable in the commerce of life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts. [ Burke ]
There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. [ Emerson ]
Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it is, as Mr. Burke calls it, the cheap defense and ornament of nations.
It produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy. [ Sydney Smith ]
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts, - the ifirst and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind, - just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference. [ Coleridge ]