Search the Wisdom Archive

Quotations Database

Search the Wisdom Archive

Quotations Database

16 years in the making, this 36,000 motivational quote search engine can identify quotations by the name of the author, keyword, gender, general ethnicity, and by phrase. It’s yours to use for free. I think it is the most diverse, deep, and far-reaching quotation search engine on values, ethics, and wisdom anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy! – Jason

 

 

By fearing whom I trust I find my way to truth; by trusting wholly I betray the truest of wisdom; better far is doubt which brings the false into the light of day.

~ Abdallah al-Ma’arri

Wisdom doesn’t automatically come with old age. Nothing does – except wrinkles. It’s true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

~ Abigail van Buren

Two distinct and different orders of men seems incident to every society, [and these] two contending interests, [engendered by] a spirit of jealousy and distrust, whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and the People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still, the source and effects of the dispute are the same.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where we collected together the wisdom, the patriotism. The devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Man uses his intelligence less in the care of his own species than he does in his care of anything else he owns or governs.

~ Abraham Meyerson

Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt. As we question our current understanding [of some subject or issue], we become curious about what information we’re missing. That search leads us to new discoveries, which in turn maintain our humility by reinforcing how much we still have to learn. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

~ Adam Grant

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.

~ Adlai Stevenson

Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom.

~ Adlai Stevenson

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

~ Adlai Stevenson

And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

~ Aeschylus

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

~ Aeschylus

Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering.

~ Aeschylus

It is always in season for old men to learn … It is a fine thing even for an old man to learn wisdom.

~ Aeschylus

A prosperous fool is a grievous burden.

~ Aeschylus

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

~ Aesop

The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.

~ Aesop

It takes a village to raise a child.

~ African Proverb

If you plant turnips you will not harvest grapes.

~ Akan proverb

He who searches for wisdom is wise; he who thinks he has found it is a fool.

~ Al-Farabi

Within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, however, the status system of Native American society would be turned on its head through contact with the products of European technology and industry. What mattered most was no longer an individual’s wisdom or understanding of the ways of nature, but his ownership of weapons, jewelry and whiskey.

~ Alain de Botton

Newton made the world seem ordered and lucid. He made the human mind seem capable of understanding the very architecture and design of God in nature; a law is the wisdom of God made manifest through the natural world.

~ Alan Kors

Being free means having options and making choices. So the problem comes down to knowing how and what to choose, knowing what’s good for you and others to do. Thus freedom entails responsibility, which entails wisdom; otherwise, freedom is frittered and fulfillment yields to frivolity.

~ Alan Nordstrom

I put my faith in the prospect that our techniques of wisdom are growing ever more powerful, and that our various social experiments will discover more enlightened systems of economy, ecology, and governance, as well as better methods of education and human development.

~ Alan Nordstrom

How can we discover and invent a global vision of planetary flourishing of our own species into the fullness of our vast potentials for health, wholeness, and a higher sanity that might be called wisdom?

~ Alan Nordstrom

Our moral and spiritual development should be aided by advancing sciences and technologies that cultivate and inculcate wisdom more widely than ever before.

~ Alan Nordstrom

The science of human happiness is called Wisdom, and those who know best how to achieve and maintain happiness we call Wise. The long heritage of that ancient science of sages who have pondered the secrets of happily living with ourselves and with others is called the Wisdom Tradition.

~ Alan Nordstrom

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

~ Albert Camus

Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

~ Albert Camus

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~ Albert Einstein

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful – and then only for a short while.

~ Albert Einstein

The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.

~ Albert Einstein

The rest of my life I want to reflect on what life is.

~ Albert Einstein

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

~ Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

~ Albert Einstein

Time and again, the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations — in short, by metaphysics.

~ Albert Einstein

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

~ Albert Einstein

This is a time when there seems to be a particular need for friends of wisdom and truth to join together.

~ Albert Einstein

The ideals that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth.

~ Albert Einstein

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

~ Albert Einstein

We should take care not to make intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

~ Albert Einstein

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

~ Albert Einstein

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

~ Albert Einstein

Watch the stars, and from them learn.

~ Albert Einstein

Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the inquiring constructive mind.

~ Albert Einstein

A higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.

~ Aldous Huxley

Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

~ Aldous Huxley

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.

~ Aldous Huxley

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

~ Aldous Huxley

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

~ Aldous Huxley

We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

~ Aldous Huxley



Note that copyright for motivational quotes, stanzas, lyrics, etc. in many cases is held by those who wrote the words, and permission to copy or reprint those words is not being granted by me. I urge you to look up “fair use of copyrighted material” and make your own decision about how, when, and where to use the words of others. If you feel I have infringed on your copyright by placing one of your inspirational quotes in the database, please contact me and I will quickly give it due consideration.

View The Full Values Of The Wise Series™

Ancient Wisdom and Progressive Thinking Brought to Life

See Full Series