W Is For Wisdom

I had an ah-ha! moment when I stumbled upon this quote from Marlene Dietrich:

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself."

Gee, I wish I had said that. Then it occurred to me – does this mean that I am no wiser than Marlene Dietrich?

A quote by William Saroyan reassured me, though. He said:

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

Marlene Dietrich was a very successful film star and I am – well, I am not.

On the other hand, Mohandas K. Gandhi pointed out:

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom . It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."

So, if I'm going to err – and I most assuredly will, from time to time – perhaps it is as well to “err on the side of caution” (Is caution a sign of wisdom? Perhaps so. Norman Cousins tells us that “ Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.”) and resort to those who are, without doubt, wiser than I. Therefore, this posting is a compendium of wise words about wisdom.

"Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity."- Robert Louis Stevenson

"The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor."- Benjamin Franklin

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."- Walter Lippmann

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."- Naguib Mahfouz

"I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday." - Abraham Lincoln

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."- Plato

"Memory is the mother of all wisdom." - Samuel Johnson

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."- George Bernard Shaw

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery."- Samuel Smiles

"If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow."- Rachel Carson

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials."- Lin Yutang

"The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people."- Mark Twain

"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil."- Robert Heinlein

I will close with this quote. While it does not mention the word wisdom, it sounds wise to me:

"Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the 
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty ;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes 
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness ,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!"
- Kalidasa