Wisest Man Quotes & Sayings

It is especially appropriate to say that the greatest command, the most condensed philosophy, the wisest success-achieving advice ever given was given by a man who was crucified. He summed it all up when he said, "Love one another." One does not really need to fight for success. One can love one's way to success. — Thomas Dreier

A child can ask a thousand questions that the wisest man cannot answer. — Jacob Abbott

It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong. — Sophocles

The wisest man the warl' e'er saw,
He dearly loved the lasses, O. — Robert Burns

On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient. — Joe Biden

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely. — Lord Chesterfield

The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I'm left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can't quite remember. — George Carlin

The wisest man is he who is kind to all, compassionate to many, and rude to none. — Debasish Mridha

The wisest man is he who can account for his actions. — Umar

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection. — William Godwin

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. — Henry David Thoreau

All public interest' legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle. — Ayn Rand

Ah Buddha, you boastful charlatan. You may have learned nothing after 6 years of suffering, but then what of 7 years? What of 17? What might you have learned from a lifetime of pain? [ ... ] From what I can tell, the wisest man in all these scriptures was the first person Buddha ever tried to teach - an Ajivika named Upaka. Buddha bragged to him of how he achieved nirvana, to which Upaka simply replied: "That may be so," and walked away. — Mark X.

You must not talk about 'ain't and can't' when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean. — Charles Kingsley

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man. — Diogenes

Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone. — Charles Caleb Colton

Passion very often makes the wisest men fools, and very often too inspires the greatest fools with wit. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous "Know thyself" inscribed in the temple of Delphi. — Konrad Lorenz

The wisest man may be a blind father. — Jules Verne

Of all I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man's life upon this earth - and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound. — Thomas Wolfe

The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has ... . Man is called a baby by God, even as a child by a man ... . The wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man. — Bertrand Russell

One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning. — Herman Melville

The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great. — James Russell Lowell

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles. — Thomas Carlyle

If we could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it exceeds all the desires of the wisest men, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is, not only as a whole and in general but also for ourselves in particular, if we are attached, as we ought to be, to the Author of all, not only as to the architect and efficient cause of our being, but as to our master and to the final cause, which ought to be the whole aim of our will, and which can alone make our happiness. — Gottfried Leibniz

What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless. — Plato

Open your eyes, Mac." "What do you mean?" "Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them. He thinks you have the heart of a warrior. He believes in you. Believe in him. — Karen Marie Moning

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all. — Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

Judgment of the people is often wiser than the wisest men. — Lajos Kossuth

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves. — Bertrand Russell

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride. — Russell Kirk

Oh, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet seducing charms?
The wisest and the best feel urgent need
Of all their caution in thy gentlest gales;
But swell'd into a gust
who then, alas!
With all his canvas set, and inexpert,
And therefore, heedless, can withstand thy power? — William Cowper

Yes, it always pays when the wife believes and admits that her husband is the wisest man in the world and that whatever he does is right. — Hans Christian Andersen

Nature hath nothing made so base, but can read some instruction to the wisest man. — Tryon Edwards

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, - you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, - I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. — Henry David Thoreau

Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses. — John Ruskin

Socrates may have thought himself to be the wisest in Athens, but King Solomon was the wisest in the world. With all his philosophy Socrates died a poor man, and with all his wisdom King Solomon died a rich man. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. — Henry David Thoreau

The wisest man has something yet to learn. — George Santayana

The gretteste clerkes been noght wisest men. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it. — Leo Tolstoy

Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. — Henry David Thoreau

Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest. — Margaret Fuller

BEAR WAS DEAD. That sweet and kindly man, the wisest I had ever known, the one I considered friend, teacher, and even father, was gone. Would — Avi

Remember that the greatest fool in the world may ask more than the wisest man can answer. — Bryant H. McGill

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is
so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group. — Robert A. Heinlein

Young Bob Lincoln and Elmer Ellsworth . . . were cutting up in the office, and Lincoln reproved them. Bob replied by quoting the well-known couplet

A little nonsense now and then
Is relished by the wisest men.

"So it is," said Lincoln; "that's the difference between the wise man and a fool, who relishes it all the time. — Emanuel Hertz

Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them. — Karen Marie Moning

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool. — Charles Caleb Colton

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion. — Robertson Davies

He is the wisest and the most knowing man who advises people not to lose hope and faith in the Mercy of Allah and not to be too sure and over-confident of immunity from His Wrath and Punishment. — Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. — T. S. Eliot

The wisest man knows he know nothing. — A. Lee Martinez

Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk — William Butler Yeats

The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They do the useless, brave, noble, divinely foolish, and the very wisest things that are done by Man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that Man is no mere creature of his habits, no automaton in his routine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky. — Walter Lippmann

Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed. — Pindar

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him. — Thomas Carlyle

Not to mention that I have finally
arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the
loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her
bed. — Elizabeth Gilbert

A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government. — Taylor Caldwell

This is beyond understanding." said the king. "You are the wisest man alive. You know what is preparing. Why do you not make a plan to save yourself?"
And Merlin said quietly, "Because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. — John Steinbeck

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depths of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Haste is productive of injury, and so is too much hesitation. He is the wisest man who does everything at the proper time. — Ovid

When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us. — Sri Chinmoy

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tied up a lot of women, have you?" He raised one eyebrow, whatever that meant. "A bit odd, are you?" She was being sarcastic, trying to taunt him into a sense of guilt. While perhaps bursting any bubble in herself of misguided, soft-hearted concern for a man with sad eyes and complicated wealth. Though his sexual inclinations were perhaps not the wisest of barbs to do either. He looked down at her, speculative.
"Difficult to say." He actually answered the question seriously. "Legally? Decidedly. But then British laws on the subject are so guilt-ridden I'm surprised we've propagated as a race." He mad a small, grim smile. "How delightful we're having this conversation. And what is it you like? — Judith Ivory

The wisdom of God exceeds that of the wisest man, more than his wisdom exceeds that of a child. If a child were to conjecture how an army is to be formed in the day of battle
how a city is to be fortified, or a state governed
what chance has he to guess right? As little chance has the wisest man when he pretends to conjecture how the planets move in their courses, how the sea ebbs and flows, and how our minds act upon our bodies. — Thomas Reid

The wisest word man reaches is the humblest he can speak. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. — Plato

This was an easy matter with a man Oft in the wrong, and never on his guard; And even the wisest, do the best they can, Have moments, hours, and days, so unprepared, That you might 'brain them with their lady's fan;' And sometimes ladies hit exceeding hard, And fans turn into falchions in fair hands, And why and wherefore no one understands. — George Gordon Byron

The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most. — Hans Christian Andersen

I have had and still do have every confidence in Paul Nitze, a man whom I have known for decades, one of the wisest servants of the American nation but always willing and capable of taking into account the interests of their allies, whoever: the British, or the French or the Germans or others. — Helmut Schmidt

Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man. — Plato

The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so. — Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

Communication is the one class no one graduates from. Even the wisest man's words will be misinterpreted by a fool. — Shannon L. Alder

Work for a Better Life as if you live forever,
And work for Better End as if you die tomorrow — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's. — G.K. Chesterton

Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best. — Euripides

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. — Jose Saramago

The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

I value my own independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful
I should equally rebel and resent his interference ... — Elizabeth Gaskell

The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance,' and I have found his words true. — Frank Arthur Swinnerton

What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation. — John Bunyan

He who in the midst of intense activity finds himself in the greatest calmness, and in the greatest peace finds intense activity, that is the greatest [Yogi as well as the wisest man] (note 2). — Swami Vivekananda

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men
as well as his great moments of grand harmony
a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion
— Friedrich Nietzsche

And with his arm around the younger man's shoulders still, he led him away from the bow and back to the small group by the tiller. Halt glanced up as they approached, caught a look from Gilan and had a pretty good idea what they had been talking about. "Where have you two been?" he asked, his tone light. admiring the view," Gilan told him. "Thought you might need a hand from the two wisest heads on board. — John Flanagan

For some moments the two men sat quietly, each wrapped in his own thoughts, then Ivor rose. 'I should speak to Levon about tomorrow's hunt,' he said. 'Sixteen [eltors], I think.'
'At least,' the shaman said in an aggrieved tone. 'I could eat a whole one myself. We haven't feasted in a long time, Ivor.'
Ivor snorted. 'A very long time, you greedy old man. Twelve whole days ... why aren't you fat?'
'Becaues,' the wisest one explained patiently, 'you never have enough food at the feasts. — Guy Gavriel Kay

The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest. — Nathanael Emmons

The wisest men are wise to the full in death. — John Ruskin

A knife of the keenest steel requires the whetstone, and the wisest man needs advice. — Zoroaster

We must get away from this limited *I did this and I did that* and the self-centeredness, that dominates our society Today. It must be a privilege to serve members of society. Not that we want rewards or medals or honor for what we do, because it is just an honor to do it, if you cannot work for that, than you missed the boat. You don't understand the teachings of the wisest men ever lived. — Jacque Fresco

My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew, who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man. — Aristotle.

Fermin shook his head. 'And is that why you believe that if you manage to unravel the mystery of Julian Carax and rescue him from oblivion, the face of your mother will come back to you?'
I looked at him. There was no irony or judgment in his expression. For a moment Fermin Romero de Torres seemed to me the wisest and most lucid man in the universe. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The fear of falling is the source of many a folly. It is a disaster. I suppose the wisest thing now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. It is thus that man distinguishes himself from the ape and rises, from discovery to discovery, towards the light. — Samuel Beckett

The wisest man takes the shortest path to peace with himself. — Robin Hobb