Wisdom Quotes

The best minds across centuries have wrestled with what it means to be wise. These quotes capture their hard-won insights.

64329 quotes

S
"The imperfect is our paradise."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Clarity is the courtesy of the philosopher."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Perfection is the enemy of completion."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"In negation lies infinite possibility."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Every object contains infinite depths."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Meaning resides in what is left unsaid."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Nothing is truly complete until abandoned."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"The absolute is found in the relative."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"Mystery sustains life; clarity destroys it."
Stéphane Mallarmé
S
"The greatest words are those never spoken."
Stéphane Mallarmé
M
"One should eat to live, not live to eat."
Molière
M
"The world is full of people who have stopped listening."
Molière
M
"The mind has its limits, but human folly is boundless."
Molière
M
"Better to appear foolish for a moment than to be foolish forever."
Molière
M
"Anger is a brief madness that often costs us our truest desires."
Molière
M
"To criticize is easier than to create; to destroy simpler than to build."
Molière
M
"The world judges us not by our intentions but by our actions."
Molière
M
"Knowledge puffs up, but wisdom builds up."
Molière
M
"The greatest fool is he who knows not that he is a fool."
Molière
M
"We are more often wrong than right, yet we persist in our convictions."
Molière
M
"The voice of reason is often drowned out by the noise of passion."
Molière
P
"Ambition without virtue is merely gilded corruption."
Pierre Corneille
A
"I sought the absolute but found only fragments."
Arthur Rimbaud
P
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."
Paul Verlaine
P
"The heart knows truths the mind cannot grasp."
Paul Verlaine
P
"The wise person knows what they don't know."
Paul Verlaine
V
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Voltaire
V
"Common sense is not so common."
Voltaire
V
"The secret of being boring is to say everything."
Voltaire
V
"Every perfect man has a defect: he is too perfect."
Voltaire