Wise Quotes, Quotations and Sayings
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas à Kempis
Knowledge talks, wisdom listens.
You've got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.
Steven D. Woodhull
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me !
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.
Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.
Albert Camus
Don’t let your victories go to your head, or your failures go to your heart.
Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.
Henry David Thoreau
Those who criticize our generation forget who raised it.
Remember, if you’re headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns!
Allison Gappa Bottke
Criticizing is easy, art is difficult.
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Violence won’t solve a thing. It makes it more challenging to solve, though.
See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.
Pope John XXIII
I don’t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.
If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.
Jim Rohn
Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philospher.
Though the circular round-and-round of routine be the bulk of life’s affairs, make an occasional jutting diversion – of fun, love, or something that will outlast you – so the shape and motion of your life shall resemble the round lifegiving sun with bright rays shining forth from all directions.
Destin Figuier
The mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work unless it’s open.
Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The best mind-altering drug is truth.
You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.
Mignon McLaughlin
Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
Now that it’s all over, what did you really do yesterday that’s worth mentioning?
Coleman Cox
A winner listens, a loser just waits untill it is their turn to talk.
Laziness will cause you pain.
Guns don’t kill people — people do.
If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.
Toni Morrison
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max Lerner
If you are not part of the cure, then you are part of the problem.
Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it.
The only time you run out of chances is when you stop taking them.
Sometimes it’s more important to be human, than to have good taste.
Brecht
The best things in life are not things.
Owning your burdens is half the battle.
Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Victor Hugo
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
All human beings, by nature, desire to know.
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.
Leo Aikman
All life is an experiment.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Frank Herbert
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
Plato
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere. The pessimist sees only the red light. But the truly wise person is color blind.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Jonathan Kozel
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.
Mignon McLaughlin
Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.
I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
Frances Willard
Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.
Chance favors only those who court her.
People cannot go wrong, if you don’t let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Excess on occasion is exhilirating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham
When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.
The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
In examinations, the foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer.
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
Sara Teasdale
Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.
Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it – torn up to irrecoverable tatters.
Samuel Butler
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues it possesses.
Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.
Mignon McLaughlin
As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.
Toss your dashed hopes not into a trash bin but into a drawer where you are likely to rummage some bright morning.
Robert Brault
It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it…. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Alice Walker
Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.
Elbert Hubbard
Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
On the bathing-tub of King T’ang the following words were engraved: “If you would one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.”
Confucian Analects
To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
Jimmy Johnson
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.
Samuel Johnson
Follow then the shining ones, the wise, the awakened, the loving, for they know how to work and forbear.
To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
John W. Gardner
There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place.
Tennessee Williams
The foolish sayings of a rich man pass for wise ones.
Face what you think you believe and you will be surprised.
William Hale White
Truer words were never spoken -” Ah, but true words leave hearts broken! Truth is only for the wise – Lovers ought to stick to lies.
He dies before he is old who is wise before his day.
Just remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.
M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter
Truer words were never spoken -” Ah, but true words leave hearts broken! Truth is only for the wise – Lovers ought to stick to lies.
Don’t look where you fall, but where you slipped.
African Proverb
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will
One can enjoy a wood fire worthily only when he warms his thoughts by it as well as his hands and feet.
Odell Shepherd
Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small.
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice that which we are for what we could become.
Charles DuBois
Fools live to regret their words, wise men to regret their silence
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.
Betty Smith
When an argument flares up, the wise man quenches it with silence
Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.
John Lennon
The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things.
It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.
Albert Einstein
No one acts more foolishly than a wise man in love.
Decorate yourself from the inside out.
Andrei Turnhollow
It is better to weep with wise men than to laugh with fools”
Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts.
Charles Dickens
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
We have a choice every day – to act on yesterday’s good intentions or get an early start on tomorrow’s regrets.
Robert Brault
For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.
When you start treating people like people, they become people.
Paul Vitale
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
Be kind to your shadow.
Rebecca Lawless
A wise man changes his mind, a fool never
I thought growing up was something that happened automatically as you got older. But it turns out it’s something you have to choose to do.
The fool speaks, the wise man listens
If you have to do it every day, for God’s sake learn to do it well.
Mignon McLaughlin
Wise men are not always silent, but they know when to be
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Down in their hearts, wise men know this truth: the only way to help yourself is to help others.
Dare to be imperfect and one day there will tug at your sleeve a soulmate.
Robert Brault
A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
Henry Miller
Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.”
Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway.
Elbert Hubbard
Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. Dandemis
Whatever you are be a good one.
Abraham Lincoln
A foolish man tells a woman to stop talking, but a wise man tells her that her mouth is extremely beautiful when her lips are closed
It’s better to fight for something than against something.
A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?
The day will happen whether or not you get up.
John Ciardi
Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men
Nature gave men two ends – one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man’s success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most.
George R. Kirkpatrick
One should always play fair when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde
Think of your faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep.
Chinese Proverb
When you live in reaction, you give your power away. Then you get to experience what you gave your power to.
N. Smith
It is wise to direct your anger towards problems — not people; to focus your energies on answers — not excuses.
When “Why not do it?” barely outweights “Why do it?” – don’t do it.
Mignon McLaughlin
If you hate your lot but wouldn’t trade it, it’s not your lot you hate.
Mignon McLaughlin
Half the failures in life arise from pulling in the horse as he is leaping.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
When you invite trouble, it’s usually quick to accept.
Giving up doesn’t always mean you are weak. Sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go.
Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise.
All philosophy in two words, – sustain and abstain.
Epictetus
Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the Forest that was left out by mistake.
Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.
Janis Joplin
Life is like riding a bicycle – in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein
In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.
Albert Schweitzer
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Robert Frost
What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly.
Mignon McLaughlin
Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
Tom Stoppard
Never confuse thoughtlessness with malice.
Robert Charles Whitehead
Yet some things you miss and some things you lose by keeping your arm outstretched.
You want to run out in front, prepare to be tripped from behind.
S.A. Sachs
Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses.
Oscar Wilde
It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.
Howard Ruff
Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired, go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
Bruce Lee
While seeking revenge, dig two graves – one for yourself.
Doug Horton
To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
Hippocrates
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.
Buddha
People are like holidays. Do others see you as Christmas, or more like Tax Day?
Ward Elliot Hour
Make somebody happy today. Mind your own business.
Ann Landers
Things sweet the taste prove in digestion sour.
William Shakespeare
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Abraham Lincoln
Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
Joaquin de Setanti
God is good, but never dance in a small boat.
Irish Saying
It is better to stir up a question without deciding it, than to decide it without stirring it up.
Joseph Joubert
Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise.
Mary Kay Ash
Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
Malcolm S. Forbes
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better.
Glenda Jackson
Lend, by your imperfections, self-esteem to others, and you will be invited everywhere.
Robert Brault
There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
The essential question is not, “How busy are you?” but “What are you busy at?”
Oprah Winfrey
Don’t get your knickers in a knot. Nothing is solved and it just makes you walk funny.
Kathryn Carpenter
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn’t have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
G.C. Lichtenberg
We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others.
Frederick W. Faber
Never saw off the branch you are on, unless you are being hanged from it.
Stanislaw Lec
Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship.
Benjamin Franklin
Don’t despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof.
Martin H. Fischer
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Peter Drucker
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Irish Proverb
Beware of a man of one book.
English Proverb
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
Baltasar Gracian
Go with your heart, buddy. Our brains only screw things up.
Chris Fedak and Allison Adler
It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.
Horace
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.
Swedish Proverb
The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.
Thomas Edison
Aspire to a lower level of harm.
Anonymous
I try not to kid myself. You know, I don’t mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.
Bill Veeck
You can’t truthfully explain your smallest action without fully revealing your character.
Mignon McLaughlin
It’s all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back.
Mick Jagger
When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.
John C. Collins
Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.
Frank Tyger
Dig the well before you are thirsty.
Chinese Proverb
Be nice to people on your way up because you’ll need them on your way down.
W. Migner
When you throw dirt, you lose ground.
Texan Proverb
The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
Albert Schweitzer
Everyone should learn to do one thing supremely well because he likes it, and one thing supremely well because he detests it.
Brigham Young
Sometimes the only way you can take a really good look at yourself is through somebody else’s eyes.
Sometimes the best way to hold onto something is to let it go.
It isn’t what you know that counts, it’s what you think of in time.
The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show.
For visions come not to polluted eyes.
Mary Howitt
The key to happiness and youth is an unencumbered spirit – whether it comes naturally or whether you have to work hard for it.
Emme Woodhull-Bäche
Remedy it, or welcome it: a wise man’s only two choices.
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
Chinese Proverb
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
Don’t let it be all in your head, nor all in your body.
V.L. Allineare
6 Responses to “Wise Quotes, Quotations and Sayings”
Comment from Maulin
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:28 pm
“There is no good in extravagance, however, there can never be extravagance in good deeds. (Prophet Mohammad (s))”
Comment from Jeff
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:28 pm
“Opportunities slide away like clouds. (Prophet Mohammad (s))”
Comment from Jacu
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:29 pm
“never challenge an old man, because if you lose, you’ve lost to an old man, and if you win, so what?”
Comment from Lovely
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I thought i had a best friend once.but it was only an illusion.trust your first instinct.
Comment from poline
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:31 pm
“its not about how hard you hit
its how hard u get hit and keep moving foward.”
Comment from David
Time May 20, 2009 at 8:27 pm
It is only with the heart that one can truly see,anything else is essential.