Wise Quotes
Wise quotes help you learn from others, not only of this generation but also going back in time.
Great men and women have left words of wisdom for everyone to make this world a better place to live, yet it often requires that you trudge your own path to find your own wisdom.
This is perhaps because, despite all the wisdom of this world in the works of great men and women, no one could ever define the purpose of life. You will have to discover it for yourself.
Here are some of the most beautiful, wise quotes that can help you in your journey to guide your life and discover its purpose.
Best Wise Quotes
1.) It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
2.) Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven
3.) The richest man is not the one who has the most but the one who needs the least.
Unknown
4.) There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
5.) A blind person who sees is better than a seeing person who is blind.
Iranian Proverb
6.) Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
John F. Kennedy
7.) We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill
8.) Deal with the faults of others as gently as your own.
Chinese Proverb
Good Wise Quotes and Proverbs
9.) Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat forever.
Chinese Proverb
10.) Plan your life as if you will live forever, and live your life like you will die the next day.
Unknown
11.) Money buys everything but good sense.
Yiddish Proverb
12.) All I know is that I do not know anything
Socrates
13.) Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Khalil Gibran
Inspirational Wise Quotes
14.) In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
15.) Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Eleanor Roosevelt
16.) The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.
John C. Maxwell
17.) You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
18.) Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
19.) Life is a journey, not a destination.
Cliff Nichols
20.) He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost anyhow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
21.) Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.
Lou Holtz
22.) Lost time is never found again.
Benjamin Franklin – see other Benjamin Franklin Quotes
Wisdom Quotations
23.) Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
24.) In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
25.) The only disability in life is a bad attitude.
Scott Hamilton – You might like World Disability Day
26.) Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.
Elbert Hubbard
27.) Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
28.) Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
29.) The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain
You might like: Best Words of Wisdom
Philosophy Quotations
30.) If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
31.) Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.
Christopher Markus
32.) This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama
33.) When what you hear and what you see don’t match, trust your eyes.
Dale Renton
34.) My philosophy is it’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.
Anthony Hopkins
35.) Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire
36.) I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams
37.) Life is a constant process of dying.
Arthur Schopenhauer
38.) Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
39.) No matter how many plans you make or how much in control you are, life is always winging it.
Carroll Bryant
40.) One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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Intelligent Reflections
41.) You can do anything, but not everything.
David Allen
42.) Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Aristotle
43.) Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
44.) Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
Basho
45.) In bad things, be slow; in good things, be fast.
Afghan Proverb
46.) There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
47.) Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Ambrose Redmoon
48.) When life is too easy for us, we must beware, or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
Eleanor Roosevelt
49.) You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
Wayne Gretzky
Notable Wise Quotes
50.) All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
51.) To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
Abraham Maslow
52.) Life has three constants: change, choice, and principles.
Stephen Covey
53.) A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Baltasar Gracian
54.) The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.
Tony Robbins
Tip: Some wise quotes may make great photo captions on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Inspiring Wise Quotes
55.) Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
Dalai Lama
56.) Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis
57.) Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.
Socrates
58.) We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
59.) God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.
Voltaire
60.) Even a fish wouldn’t get into trouble if it kept its mouth shut.
Korean Proverb
61.) The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.
Oprah Winfrey
62.) There is no passion to be found playing small–in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
Nelson Mandela
63.) The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
Marcel Proust
64.) The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
Vince Lombardi
65.) Be wise today so you don’t cry tomorrow.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Wise Sayings
66.) He that respects himself is safe from others.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
67.) Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Albert Einstein
68.) One should speak little with others and much with oneself.
Danish Proverb
69.) He who flees at the right time can fight again.
Marcus Terentius Varro
70.) Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
Henry Ford
71.) A crown’s no cure for a headache.
English Proverb
72.) I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
73.) The economy is the wealth of the poor and the wisdom of the rich.
French Proverb
74.) Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect too much, enjoy what you have.
Dean Koontz
Wisdom By Confucius
75.) By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Short Wise Quotes About Life
76.) Knowledge is love and light and vision.
Helen Keller
77.) Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie
78.) The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney
79.) Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.
Will Rogers
80.) Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller
81.) Failure is another stepping-stone to greatness.
Stephen Hawking
Motivational Quotes
82.) You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Mahatma Gandhi
83.) Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; it is what gives life its deepest significance.
Roy T. Bennett
84.) You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated.
Maya Angelou
85.) Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
86.) You just gotta keep going and fighting for everything, and one day, you’ll get to where you want.
Naomi Osaka
87.) If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
Francis David
Inspirational Life Quotes
88.) It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
89.) Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Anne Lamott
90.) Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau
91.) The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
92.) Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failures are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
Dale Carnegie
93.) The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Positive Quotes
94.) Keep smiling because life is a beautiful thing, and there’s so much to smile about.
Marilyn Monroe
95.) I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Thomas Jefferson
96.) The wise person doesn’t give the right answers but poses the right questions.
Claude Levi-Strauss
97.) Keep your face towards the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.
Walt Whitman
98.) A dead end is just a good place to turn around.
Naomi Judd
99.) I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Wisdom Quotes
100.) Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
101.) A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou
102.) We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
103.) Champions keep playing until they get it right.
Billie Jean King
104.) Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
105.) Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
106.) Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe, and the heck with everybody. Justin Cronin
By Michael O’Halloran
Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and four on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market, most of which deal with wordplay. Mike is married and a father of four daughters.
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