Wisdom is not the same as intelligence — it is intelligence filtered through experience, humility, and time. These quotes offer the kind of perspective you usually have to live several decades to acquire, compressed into a sentence or two.
“Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.”
“There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.”
“Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country's principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.”
“If you have a vaccine or an antidote that people can benefit from, you're not going to want to keep it to yourself. You're going to want to spread that wisdom or whatever to as many people as you can, so everybody can benefit from it.”
“It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.”
“We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“You must accept responsibility for your actions, but not the credit for your achievements.”
“Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.”
“Winning is not everything, but wanting to win is.”
“To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.”
“Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.”
“Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.”
“No man was ever wise by chance.”
“I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.”
“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.”
“As a parent and a citizen, I'll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs's example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.”