If you’re a modern explorer looking for inspiration and guidance on your journey, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve compiled a list of timeless wisdom quotes from some of the greatest thinkers of all time.
These quotes about wisdom cover a range of topics, from love and happiness to success and personal growth, and are sure to offer a fresh perspective on life.
Whether you’re seeking wisdom for your own personal development or looking for a way to inspire others, these quotes are sure to leave a lasting impact. So sit back, relax, and prepare to be inspired by the wise words of some of the greatest minds in history.
Wisdom Quotes
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Marcel Proust
Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.
Baltasar Gracian
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.
Doug Larson
Experience – the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
Ambrose Bierce
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
Karl Kraus
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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 bitterest.
Confucius
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
Socrates
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Hal Borland
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
Martin H. Fischer
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
Maurice Switzer
The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.
Abigail Van Buren
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
Think before you speak. Read before you think.
Fran Lebowitz
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Aristotle
Life is from the inside out. When you shift on the inside, life shifts on the outside.
Kamal Ravikant
Life can be simple and beautiful. Focus on the good things.
Maxime Lagacé
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
I’m always doing things I can’t do. That’s how I get to do them.
Pablo Picasso
Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Marcus Aurelius
It all begins and ends in your mind. What you give power to, has power over you, if you allow it.
Leon Brown
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam
If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.
Mary Engelbreit
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
John Lennon
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Rumi
Virtually nothing is impossible in this world if you just put your mind to it and maintain a positive attitude.
Lou Holtz
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
Jules Renard
When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.
Lao Tzu
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.
Confucious
Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.
Norman Vincent Peale
Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.
Theodore Roosevelt
May you live every day of your life.
Jonathan Swift
You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
Patrick Ness
The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
Paulo Coelho
Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; wisdom is humble that it knows no more.
William Cowper
Everything is within your power, and your power is within you.
Janice Trachtman
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
Lao Zhu
Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
Harper Lee
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll
Look for the good in every person and every situation. You’ll almost always find it.
Brian Tracy
Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
Otto von Bismarck
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tzu
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.
Seneca
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
Plato
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
Marilyn vos Savant
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in few.
Pythagoras
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
Sandra Carey
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mahatma Gandhi
Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Confucius
There are three constants in life…change, choice and principles.
Stephen Covey
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them–that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill
Let your actions demonstrate your wisdom.
Truman Capote
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you do the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr
Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little then to break. J
Ane Wells
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
George Santayana
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
C. S. Lewis
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
Convince yourself everyday that you are worthy of a good life. Let go of stress, breathe. Stay positive, all is well.
Germany Kent
Make peace with yourself, and both heaven and earth will make peace with you. St.
Isaac the Syrian
Faith gives us strength and reassurance and leaves us bathed in the wisdom that we are never alone.
Socrates
What wills to grow will grow. What wills to flow will flow.
Donna Goddard
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
John C. Maxwell
Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will.
Vernon Howard
The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.
Thomas S. Monson
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
Everything is hard before it is easy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Intelligence without wisdom brings destruction.
Erol Ozan
Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
Thus, a wise individual is the one who learns to see the positive even in unfavorable events and unanticipated behavior of people.
Lindsay J. Hallie
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge.
Charles Spurgeon
It is said that wisdom lies not in seeing things, but seeing through things.
Elbert Hubbard
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
Edward Hersey Richards
Knowledge is knowing what to say. Wisdom is knowing when to say it.
Colette
Never, no, never did nature say one thing and wisdom say another.
Charles Dickens
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.
Mark Twain
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
David Starr Jordan
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
Confucius
Happiness and freedom begin with one principle. Some things are within your control and some are not.
Epictetus
While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us.
Benjamin Franklin
Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.
Viktor Frankl
When we ignore our inner wisdom, we will come to regret it.
John Soforic
Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Live simply so others may simply live.
Mother Teresa
The more we learn, the more we discover how much we do not know.
Yoda
Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this.
Homer
You’ve heard that it’s wise to learn from experience, but it is wiser to learn from the experience of others.
Rick Warren
Seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child.
Ron Wild
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Aristotle
Turn your wounds into wisdom.
Oprah Winfrey
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
Albert Einstein
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them–that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.
Amelia Earhart
Knowledge comes from learning. Wisdom comes from living.
Anthony Douglas Williams
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
Lin Yutang
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Socrates
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
Aristotle
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.
Peter Conrad
Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.
Rumi
There is a universal, intelligent, life force that exists within everyone and everything. It resides within each one of us as a deep wisdom, an inner knowing. We can access this wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom through our intuition, an inner sense that tells us what feels right and true for us at any given moment.
Shakti Gawain
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner
Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
Hermann Hesse
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Ansel Adams
Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it.
M.H. McKee
Parting Words
As you reflect on these timeless wisdom quotes, may they inspire you to continue your exploration of the world and of yourself. Remember that wisdom is not just about accumulating knowledge, but also about putting that knowledge into action. So go forth, fellow explorer, and live your life with intention, curiosity, and a thirst for growth.
We’re curious, what’s your favorite among these wisdom quotes? Are there any others you’d add? Leave a comment below.
You might also like these related quote collections:
- Quotes About the Mind
- Quotes About Finding Yourself
- Quotes About Self-Actualization
- Quotes About Life Direction
- Quotes About Epiphanies
Originally Published: April 24, 2023
