Pearls of Wisdom_ A Harvest of Quotations from All Ages by Jerome Angel and Walter D. Glanze
The wise don’t expect to find life worth living; they make it that way.
Anonymous
Each day should be passed as though it were our last.
Publilius Syrus (ca. 50 B.C.)
Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers
Defer not till tomorrow to be wise, Tomorrow’s sun to thee may never rise.
William Congreve
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
Ludwig Borne
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha (6th century B. C.)
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(1st century A.D.)
A person who doesn’t know but knows that he doesn’t know is a student; teach him. A person who knows but who doesn’t know that he knows is asleep; awaken him. But a person who knows and knows that he knows is wise; follow him.
Old Asian proverb
Don’t be angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, because you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas a Kempis (15th century)
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nothing is worth more than this day.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. Chesterton
Nobody can contribute to the best of humanity who does not make the best out of himself.
Johann Gottfried Herder
Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through. Face it!
Joseph Conrad
Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best-bred man in the group.
Jonathan Swift
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin
Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.
Anonymous
Explanation given by a pupil for not joining in discussion: "I think I’ll learn more by listening. Anything I would say I already know. "
Quoted by The Christian Science Monitor
There’s only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry Kissinger
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
The most important words we’ll ever utter are those words we say to ourselves, about ourselves, when we’re by ourselves.
Al Walker
I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
George Bums
As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.
Marshall McLuhan
See how fleeting and trifling is the condition of humans; yesterday an embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the tiny sliver of time that you are given, live rationally, and depart from life cheerfully, the way the ripe olive falls, praising the season that brought it forth and the tree that nurtured it.
Marcus Aurelius (2nd century A. D.)
I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.
Jawaharlal Nehru
A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.
Woodrow Wilson
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent.
Abraham Lincoln
I am a human being: nothing human is alien to me.
Terence (2nd century B. C.)
Every person bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
(16th century)
Few blame themselves until they have exhausted all other possibilities.
Anonymous
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
Robert Southey
Even the highest towers begin from the ground. - Chinese saying