This section cites quotations that convey insights relating to wisdom, spirituality, and to the nature and attainment of insight (i.e., "truth") itself.
A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
- anonymous
Words are like sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
- anonymous
The nearer we get to God, the quieter He speaks.
- anonymous
God has two thrones: one in highest heaven and the other in the lowest heart.
- anonymous
Those who stand for nothing are apt to fall for anything.
- anonymous
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; A sense of humor, to console him for what he is.
- anonymous
Swallow your pride occasionally. It's non-fattening.
- anonymous
The fellow who blows his horn the loudest is usually in the deepest fog.
- anonymous
It's great to believe in one's self, but don't be too easily convinced.
- anonymous
When you have nothing to say, don't say it out loud!
- anonymous
Wise men talk because they have something to say -- Fools because they have to say something.
- anonymous
With most men, unbelief in one thing stems from blind belief in another.
- anonymous
By night, even an atheist half believes in God.
- anonymous
On the road of life, we often come to the point where we think we must decide, long before we come to the road where wisdom intersects our path.
- R.H.P.
He who composes himself is wiser than he who composes books.
- anonymous
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
- anonymous
Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.
- Chinese proverb
Time is timeless.
- Native American proverb
All good things come by grace, and grace is an art, and art does not come easy.
- A River Runs Through It
The brain is the most overrated organ in the body.
- Woody Allen (Manhattan)
[Idolatry is] taking the frivolous seriously.
- W.H. Auden
God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere.
- Augustine (q.i. R.G. Purtell, Reason to Believe, p.132)
There may be said to be two classes of people in this world, those who constantly divide the world into two classes and those who do not.
- Robert Benchley
We carry with us the wonders we seek without us.
- Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici , q.i. Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p.118)
... a man of knowledge ... is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control.... His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace ...
- Carlos Castaneda (A Separate Reality)
We are not sent to battle for God, but to be used by God in his battling.
- Oswald Chambers
Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountains, so the routine of every day life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world.
- Chasidic (q.i. Gates of Repentance, Meditation 1 [p.3]).
Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe anything.
- G.K. Chesterton (q.i. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, p.130)
My opinion is this -- that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Collected Letters, p.709)
A teacher is indeed wise if he does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
- Confucius
Books are fatal; they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
- Benjamin Disraeli (Lothair)
The Anitchrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.... Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for the truth.
- Umberto Eco (William, in The Name of the Rose, p.491)
What has gone wrong, probably, is that we have failed to see ourselves as part of a large and indivisible whole.... we have failed to understand that the earth does not belong to us, but we to the earth.
- Rolf Edberg
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not say things.
What you are stands over you the while,
and thunders so that I cannot hear
what you say to the contrary.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (q.i. Wayne W. Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones, p.189)
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
- Emerson
A man is what he thinks about all day
- Emerson
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
- F.S. Fitzgerald
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul set on fire.
- Ferdinand Foch
Well done is better than well said.
- Benjamin Franklin
All mankind is divided into three classes; those who are immovable; those who are movable; and those who move.
- Benjamin Franklin
Only the idea which has materialized in the flesh can influence man; the idea which remains a word only changes words.
- Erich Fromm (q.i. The Gospel According to Zen, p.128)
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
- Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
Ah, happy he who still can hope to rise,
Emerging from this sea of fear and doubt!
What no man knows, alone could make us wise;
And what we know, we well could do without.
- Goethe (Faust, Part I, p.66)
Consciousness must surely be traced back to the rocks -- the rocks which have been here since life began and so make a meeting place for the roots of life in time and space, the earliest and the simplest.
- Jacquetta Hawkes
Will the future ever arrive? ... Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
- Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)
... the bigger the crowd the better the truth -- and the greater the catastrophe.
- C.G. Jung (Psychology and Alchemy, p.481)
Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding.
- C.G. Jung (Psychology and Alchemy, p.483)
The purpose of research is not to imagine that one possesses the theory which alone is right, but, doubting all theories, to approach gradually nearer to the truth.
- C.G. Jung (On the Nature of Dreams)
... the inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in (respect to) what it has granted.
- Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason, p.153)
The scale of reason is not quite as impartial as we might think: the lever carrying the inscription: 'Future Hopes' has a mechanical advantage; it always succeeds in outweighing, even with the smallest weights on its side, the speculations of far greater weight placed in the opposite tray. This is a defect which truly speaking I cannot remove, nor do I want to remove it ever.
- Immanuel Kant (Dreams of a Spirit Seer, pp.349-50)
A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You'll ask me why. It's because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.
- Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation, p.499)
Voltaire is known for having said: "If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him." However, if Voltaire had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent him!
- Jonathan Ketchum
I am part of all that I have read.
- John Kieran
Arguments are reasons for not disbelieving what we believe because we have seen.
Arguments, though, are not of themselves sufficient reasons for believing. Only seeing ... can provide a reason for belief.
- Erazim Kohak (The Embers and the Stars, p.175)
He dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven (Space) is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him. Blessed is He!
- C.S. Lewis (Perlandra [Macmillan, 1944], p.214f; q.i. R.G. Purtell, Reasons to Believe, p.133)
Then, in the deep silence, wisdom begins to sing her unending, sunlit, inexpressible song: the private song she sings to the solitary soul. It is his own song and hers -- the unique, irreplaceable song that each soul sings for himself with the unknown Spirit, as he sits on the doorstep of his own being, the place where his existence opens out into the abyss of God's nameless, limitless freedom. It is the song that each one of us must sing, the song of grace that God has composed Himself, that He may sing it within us. It is the song of His mercy for us, which, if we do not listen to it, will never be sung. And if we do not join with God in singing this song, we will never be fully real: for it is the song of our own life welling up like a stream out of the very heart of God's creative and redemptive love.
Now each man's individual song, that he sings in secret with the Spirit of God, blends also in secret with the unheard notes of every other individual song. The voices of all the men who love God, the living and the dead, those who are on earth, those who suffer in the place of probation, those who have gone into the place of victory and rest: these voices all form a great choir whose music is heard only in the depths of silence, because it is more silent than the silence itself.
- Thomas Merton (Seasons of Celebration, pp.214-215)
Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay is inquisitive after nothing.
- Montaigne
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.
- Sir Isaac Newton
Truth is that error without which certain beings cannot live.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I am becoming aware that with words ambiguous feelings enter into my life. It almost seems as if it is impossible to speak and not sin.... Many people ask me to speak, but nobody as yet has invited me for silence. Still, I realize that the more I speak, the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say. People expect too much from speaking, too little from silence.
- Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Genesee Diary, pp.133-134)
Philosophy is like the tower of Babel -- everyone has a different understanding of the words they're speaking, so truth (like Babel's heaven) can never be reached.
- S.R.P.
There is but one rest for the heart: GOD. All else is but restlessness.
- P.R.S.
Profundity: A search for the simple.
- P.R.S.
The eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies me.
- Blaise Pascal
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
- Edgar Allen Poe (q.i. Reunions, p.65)
A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
- Jean Paul Richter
Discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
- Albert Szent-Gyorgi
Genuine metaphysics is not theory and dogma; it is, rather, a tendency of the recovering-fulfilling spirit, a directedness toward the Unconditional.
- Paul Tillich (Political Expectation, p.72)
Listening to both sides of the story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.
- F. Tyger
We may visit the realm of speculation, but we must live in the realm of faith.
- Donald Walhout, Interpreting Religion
Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms
- Simon Weil (Waiting for God [N.Y. Harper & Row, 1973]; q.i. Tilden Edmonds, Spiritual Friend, p.7)
To know things as they are is better than to believe things as they seem.
- Tom Wicker
God is "the Truth". The Bible is the "truth about the Truth". Theology is the "truth about the truth about the Truth". Fundamentalism is the "truth about the truth about the truth about the Truth". Christian people live in these many truths about the Truth, and, because of them, have not "the Truth".
- Richard Wurmbrand (Tortured For Christ, pp.72-73)
wisdom
Back to Steve Palmquist's home page
This page was last updated on 20 November 1997.
Send comments to: Steve Palmquist or Simon Wong.
