Sapiential Quotes & Sayings

It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4) — Thomas Merton

Writing songs is really about writing. It's not about necessarily focusing on one particular style or making it one particular thing. — Jann Klose

My parents couldn't afford a full time drama school, but I basically just did every class I could do, and followed every drama interest I could. When I was 15 or 16 I did drama courses. — Christopher Parker

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life. — Brendan Behan

For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others. — Boleslaw Prus

In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. — Sam Llewellyn

If we're talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it's the only universal strategy that works. — Alex Steffen

Those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks — Umberto Eco

They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner's hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It is always so strange that when you are working you never think of all the inspiring thoughts that made you take up the work in the first instance. Before I was in hospital at all I thought that because I suffered myself I should feel it a grand thing to relieve the sufferings of other people. But now, when I am actually doing something which I know relieves someone's pain, it is nothing but a matter of business. I may think lofty thoughts about the whole thing before or after but never at the time. At least, almost never. Sometimes some quite little thing makes me stop short all of a sudden and I feel a fierce desire to cry in the middle of whatever it is I am doing. — Vera Brittain

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy. — Paul Krugman

An interlocking set of new enemies was emerging: globalization, foreigners, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, high taxes, and the incompetent politicians who could not cope with these challenges. A widening public disaffection for the political Establishment opened the way for an "antipolitics" that the extreme Right could satisfy better than the far Left after 1989. After the Marxist Left lost credibility as a plausible protest vehicle when the Soviet Union collapsed, the radical Right had no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry "losers" of the new postindustrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe. — Robert O. Paxton