Quotes

Wisdom Quotes: I have not included many quotes from the Bible, in which (of course) is found supreme wisdom.

You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice. --Jesus of Nazareth

Any [teaching] that is good is in the Word of God, and any that is not in the Word of God is not good. I am a Bible Christian and if an archangel with a wingspread as broad as a constellation shining like the sun were to come and offer me some new truth, I'd ask him for a reference. If he could not show me where it is found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, 'I'm awfully sorry, you don't bring any references with you' -- A. W. Tozer

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations. --Isaac D'Israeli

He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin. --John Ruskin

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. --John Ruskin

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas. --John Ruskin

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs. --John Ruskin

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. --Reinhold Niebuhr (called the Serenity Prayer)

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic. --W. E. Gladstone

We look forward to the time when the power to love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace. --W. E. Gladstone

Avarice, where it has full dominion, excludes every other passion. --W. E. Gladstone

Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church? --John Calvin

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. --Reinhold Niebuhr

Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ. --John Calvin

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder. --John Ruskin (How powerfully much contemporary music has proved this!)

It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men. --John Calvin

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die. --Dorothy Sayers

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act --George Orwell

In matters of faith and science I am more impressed by one evident reason or by one authoritative passage of Holy Scripture correctly understood than by the chorus of mankind. I am not ashamed to be convinced of truth. In fact, to have truth victorious over me I consider the most useful thing for me. But I never want to be defeated by the multitude. It may, indeed, be read in the sacred utterances that the multitude, as a rule, errs, and that very often one solitary man may put all the rest to flight. --William of Ockham

Fun is good; Truth is better; but Love is best of all. --Wm. Makepeace Thackeray

Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. --George Macdonald

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them the things they could and should do for themselves. --Edward Everett Hale

Sometimes those who oppose capital punishment talk about 'the sanctity of human life.' ... But the issue of capital punishment comes up only because the murderer has already violated the sanctity of human life. Are we to say that his life has more sanctity than the life or lives he has taken? --Thomas Sowell

As John Adams said, more than two centuries ago: "Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." --Thomas Sowell

Humanism is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods'. --Whittaker Chambers

I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. --Fredrick Douglas

...Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed...so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.--Patrick Henry

Let no pleasure tempt thee, no profit allure thee, no ambition corrupt thee, no example sway thee, no persuasion move thee to do anything which thou knowest to be evil; so thou shalt live jollily, for a good conscience is a continual Christmas. --Benjamin Franklin

He who begins by loving Christianity more than truth [Christ is the Truth], will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Anything must be true before it can significantly claim other merits. Without truth, all else is worthless. - E. Gellner, Postmodernism & Reason.

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.--Charles Sanders Peirce (This has always been my answer to Descartes, who only pretended to doubt everything).

How you treat the helpless is the real test of morality. Lots of people are flunking that test big time. --Thomas Sowell

Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization. --Charles Colson

We may define a happy man as one whose activity accords with perfect virtue and who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete and perfect lifetime. --John Adams

Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. --John Adams

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men. Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson).

Federalist Papers ( #43) refers "to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed." --James Madison

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read....It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. --S.I. Hayakawa

It is political correctness, scourge of our times. That intellectual burlesque that places greater value on protecting political sensibilities than on protecting our nation through attention to political realities. --Kathleen Parker

The need now is for order. This is not the age of reformation but of defence, when every man of goodwill should devote all his powers to preserving the few good things left to us from our grandfathers. --Evelyn Waugh

There are two kinds of fools: One says, This is old therefore it is good. The other one says, This is new therefore it is better. --William Inge

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. --Dean William Inge

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. --Abraham Lincoln

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. --Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. --Demosthenes

Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. --Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. --Henry Ward Beecher

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live. --John Ruskin

Unity without verity is no better than conspiracy. --John Trapp

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic. --John Ruskin

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without. --Joseph Addison

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. --Josh Billings

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. --Leonardo DaVinci

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. --Marcus Aurelius [Considered one of the best pagan emperors, known as a wise Stoic philosopher, who nevertheless presided over a terrible persecution of Christians. Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and many, many others died under the hand of this 'wise man.' "The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God."]

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. --Thomas Jefferson

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. --Henry Steele Commager

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil. --Cicero [The function of knowledge is to discriminate between true and false; wisdom has an essential ethical element.]

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. --Edith Wharton

I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels. --Calvin

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. --Immanuel Kant

Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought. --John Ruskin

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ''What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me." --Joseph Addison

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. --Jonathan Kozol

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. --Norman Cousins

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness. --Sophocles

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. --Joseph Addison

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever. --Thomas Aquinas

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. --Sidney J. Harris

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be. --Thomas Jefferson

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence. --William Golding

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. --Buckminster Fuller

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. --Linus Pauling

Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality. --Alfred Painter

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. --C. S. Lewis

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it. --C. S. Lewis

An impassioned presentation of great truths gives a truer apprehension of them (because they are great truths) than a moderate, dull, indifferent, 'objective' presentation. --Richard Kirby (hereafter, RK)

There are some things we don't believe unless we understand them, and there are other things we don't understand unless we believe them... --Augustine of Hippo

The purpose of law is to encourage goodness and to restrain and punish evil (period). --RK

Christianity is more than a set of doctrines. It is a full-fledged worldview and life view. It is absurd and wicked to try to divorce the secular from the sacred. For the Christian whether he eats or drinks, works or plays, runs for office or courts a wife, he does all to the glory of God. --RK

I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies. -- Pietro Aretino

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. -- Aristotle

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. -- Aristotle

Half a truth is often a great lie. -- Benjamin Franklin

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. -- Henry George

Below the navel there is neither religion nor truth. -- Italian Proverb

Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science. -- Henry David Thoreau

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them --A. A. Milne: Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook. -- U.S. Army Ranger Handbook

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience. --George Bernard Shaw

The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion. --Stanley Baldwin, British Prime Minister

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. --C. S. Lewis

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. --CSL

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. --CSL

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. --CSL

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest. --CSL

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. --CSL

It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others. --Charles Spurgeon

When a man is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. --Samuel Johnson

A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe. --Euripides

I have spent a lifetime attempting to put difficult matters into easily understood language. My students at two seminaries will vouch for the fact that I always strongly urged simplicity and clarity in preaching. I have taught that the second cousin to truth is clarity and the brother to lying is obscurity! It is my belief that by hard work, anything—once understood—can be made simple and intelligible. It is with that conviction in mind that I always sit down to write. --Jay E. Adams

I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that "the just shall live by his faith." Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the "justice of God" had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven. --Martin Luther

We are creatures of time, and often fail to take into consideration the fact that God is not limited as we are. That which appears to us as past, present, and future, is all present to His mind. --Loraine Boettner

Ironically, those who seek their ultimate value in the next world are the only ones able to do much good in this one. --Herbert Schlossberg,

God, being who He is, must always be sought for Himself, never as a means toward something else....Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. --A. W. Tozer

First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf. -- Martin Luther

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self. --Martin Luther

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave. --Martin Luther

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. --Voltaire

It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being -- but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss. --Socrates (in Phaedo)

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked. --Augustine

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others. --Augustine

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden. --Augustine

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself. --Augustine

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible. --Augustine

Love is the beauty of the soul. --Augustine

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. --Booker T Washington

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. --Socrates

Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back. --Thomas Sowell

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. --Isaac Newton

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences. --Jacques Maritain

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim. --Thomas Babington Macaulay (TBM's little joke)

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair. --R. D. Laing

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. --Samuel Johnson

Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. -- Giordano Bruno

Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy. --Samuel Johnson

The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed. --Patrick Henry

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity. --Edward Gibbon

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. --Oliver Goldsmith

A man ought to know his limitations. --Dirty Harry

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. It is only by restraining these base impulses that we can be civilized. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

All coming to Jesus has the feeling of homecoming upon it. All going away from Him has the sense of estrangement upon it. The rich young ruler went away from Jesus "sorrowful." Everybody does. Not only estrangement from God, but also estrangement from oneself. And the universe! And from life! You are not at home with life, unless you are at home with Life. And Jesus is Life! --E. Stanley Jones

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion. --G. K. Chesterton

A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent. -- John Calvin

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. -- Sir Winston Churchill

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. --Thomas Babington Macaulay

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. --George Santayana

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. --Alexis de Tocqueville

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden - that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. --C. S. Lewis

For many thoughtful people today the only path to peaceful relationships in a pluralistic world is the path of no truth that deserves assent from everyone. It seems on the face of it to make sense. If no one claims that what he believes deserves assent from anyone else, then we can live together in peace. Right? So peaceful pluralism and diminished truth claims go hand in hand. But it doesn’t work like that. When there is no truth that deserves assent from everybody, the only arbiter in our competing desires is power. Where truth doesn’t define what’s right, might makes right. And where might makes right, weak people pay with their lives. When the universal claim of truth disappears, what you get is not peaceful pluralism or loving relationships; what you get is concentration camps and gulags. --John Piper

[T]hose who have had light, and improved it not, but retained it for speculation, it has spoiled on their hands, and bred worms of doubt, like the misused manna of old. - James Caughey

If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discernment, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in Christianity, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it." -- Charles Finney

The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself. -- Washington Allston

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder. -- Arnold Toynbee

Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). I view that statement as good news. It is the end of confusion. It is the end of ambiguity. It is the end of wishy-washy postmodernist ideas. It is simply good news! When I became a Christian it was a relief and a joy to finally know the truth about God, to know who He is, to understand His nature, and to know His will. -- Brian Flynn

All truth is safe and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps back the truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal or both. --F. Max Muller

The Bible calls Satan the great deceiver. To be deceived means to be led away from the truth without knowing it. If the person being deceived knew they were being deceived, then deception would not have occurred. One must believe that one is not deceived in order to be deceived. It is just that simple. --Roger Oakland

The minister of righteousness shall be on this wise --- his life shall agree with the word, and his lips shall give forth that which is wholly true, there will be no mixture. When the mixture appears then you will know he is not a minister of righteousness. The deceivers speak first the truth and then error, to cover their own sins which they love. Therefore I exhort and command you to study the Scriptures relative to seducing spirits, for this is one of the great dangers of these last days. --Stanley Frodsham

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point. --Martin Luther

The greatest wisdom on this earth is holiness." - W.S. Plumer

We fear men so much because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God. - William Gurnall

If your faith can't be tested, it can't be trusted. -Unknown

When filled with holy truth the mind rests. - C.H. Spurgeon

One life to live
and soon it will be past.
Only things done for Christ
will ever truly last." - unknown

The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still. - A.W. Tozer