“Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.”
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.
“Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.”
“Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.”
“A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.”
“Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.”
“The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life - in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk and to make our words and actions all of a color.”
“Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.”
“The difference between chirping out of turn and a faux pas depends on what kind of a bar you're in.”
“And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.”
“At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.”
“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”
“This society in which we live is radically changing. What previous generations saw as evil is now embraced as being good. It is a dangerous and slippery slope upon which we stand when we reject what Solomon called the beginning of wisdom - the fear of God.”
“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.”
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
“Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.”