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

C
"The more I wonder, the more I love."
Celie
S
"You got a lot to learn about love."
Shug Avery
C
"I ain't no fool. I know what he want."
Celie
J
"All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain."
Judge Holden
N
"You've got to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall."
Nettie
E
"The problem these days is that we're all such experts on the lives of others."
Emily Tallis
M
"Suffering is only suffering if it is wasted."
Mariam
H
"Being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be."
Huckleberry Finn
H
"I warn't the boy to meddle."
Huckleberry Finn
H
"I warn't expecting nothing."
Huckleberry Finn
H
"Everything they done was jist right."
Huckleberry Finn
T
"The smaller things in life often carry the greatest weight."
The Narrator (omniscient)
T
"Children perceive truths that adults have learned to ignore."
The Narrator (omniscient)
M
"Revenge is a bitter fruit."
Mariam
B
"She could not undo what had been done."
Briony Tallis
B
"She understood at last what she had taken from them."
Briony Tallis
J
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible."
Judge Holden
S
"Never mine what anybody tell you."
Shug Avery
S
"She got more sense than anybody I know."
Shug Avery
C
"I understand now what love really is."
Celie
H
"I ain't a-going to tell all I know"
Huckleberry Finn
T
"Desire is a malevolent thing. It makes diamonds into frogs and Cupidstones into fish."
The Narrator (omniscient)
T
"Terrible things have happened. But you don't have to become terrible."
The Narrator (omniscient)
T
"Sometimes what we want most cannot be obtained."
The Narrator (omniscient)
T
"The body remembers what the mind forgets."
The Narrator (omniscient)
S
"Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some."
Serena Joy
B
"The longer she waited, the more convinced she became of the rightness of her action."
Briony Tallis
B
"She was learning the cost of her certainty."
Briony Tallis
B
"She had confused pity with morality."
Briony Tallis
B
"She had learned that intention was not the same as outcome."
Briony Tallis