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

A
"To reach the goal, one must sometimes take a step backward."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"To understand the world, one must first become incomprehensible to it."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"The heart knows secrets the mind will never comprehend."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"I have learned to read the language of shadows and light."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"The path to truth winds through the forest of confusion."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"The night sky holds more answers than all our questions."
Arthur Rimbaud
A
"What we resist, we strengthen; what we accept, we transcend."
Arthur Rimbaud
G
"We are all mad, but the question is whether we are mad enough."
Gérard de Nerval
G
"There is no greater wealth than wisdom, no greater poverty than folly."
Gérard de Nerval
G
"The mind is everything; what you think you become."
Gérard de Nerval
G
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
Gérard de Nerval
G
"Sweet are the uses of adversity."
Gérard de Nerval
G
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
Gérard de Nerval
V
"Wisdom comes from experience and reflection."
Victor Leconte de Lisle
V
"Wisdom is knowing what you do not know."
Victor Leconte de Lisle
T
"The true, the beautiful, and the good are one"
Théophile Gautier
T
"The unexamined life is not worth living"
Théophile Gautier
T
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"
Théophile Gautier
G
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."
Guy de Maupassant
G
"The mediocre mind is concerned with the extraordinary, and the extraordinary mind with the ordinary."
Guy de Maupassant
A
"Wisdom consists not in seeing things, but in seeing them in their right relations."
Alexandre Dumas, fils
A
"Wisdom comes from experience, not years."
Alexandre Dumas, fils
"There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery."
Charles Baudelaire
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
Charles Baudelaire
"The truly important thing is not to think much, but to love much."
Charles Baudelaire
"The most profound truths are often hidden in plain sight."
Charles Baudelaire
P
"In the chaos of the world, wisdom is often found in quiet acceptance."
Paul Verlaine
P
"The words we do not speak are often more powerful than those we do."
Paul Verlaine
P
"In darkness, we discover what light had always hidden from us."
Paul Verlaine
G
"We are all mad in our own ways, and madness is but another name for passion."
Gérard de Nerval