Stephen S. Hall put out a very complete and (to me) compelling book entitled Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. In it, he does a fine job of laying out a history of the subject, some of the hallmarks of what it is and what it isn’t, and brings some scientific findings in to enlighten and broaden the view. In this blog, I share some information considered to be “reviews” and then include many quotes about wisdom from the book. These are little-known, broad, intelligible, useful quotations, so I hope you appreciate them and add them to your collection. Oh, and read the book!
I put a brief review up on Amazon.com. However, a prolific reviewer named Brad (who had 550 reviews to his name!) had a lot to say about it. It’s pretty enlightening, and since I want to give the author a positive blog, allow me to share it at length:
“No book is perfect, and neither is any opinion, but Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience deserves five stars as a good attempt to discuss an important and surprisingly under-discussed topic. I read it in 2010, and after reading many uncomplimentary reviews, read it again to see if I missed something — but my original favorable opinion stands. Hall seems to resemble a friendly tour guide who broadly admires his subject, rather than a pompous world authority who wants us to think she/he knows everything about their topic. As the author admits, it’s a humbling and ever-mysterious topic that most people would prefer to either shy away from or to speak with dogmatism.
Purpose: Hall wrote the book to systematically compare classical accounts of wisdom with sophisticated modern studies from neuroscientists, behavioral economists, and psychologists. Hall seems to find the two complement each other nicely.
Organization: Hall begins by discussing the nature of wisdom (he concludes its need is omnipresent but is still a vague and changeable noun best defined by its results rather than what it “is”). He then gives an excellent classification of the components of wisdom, specifically, Emotional Regulation, Evaluative Judgment, Humaneness/ Moral Competence, Compassion/ Decency, Humility, Altruism/ Justice, Patience, and Managing Uncertainty. He covers each with a good chapter. He then describes how we cultivate Wisdom, and why it is more than just the sum of its parts.
Documentation: Given the potentially controversial nature of the subject, Hall has (wisely) chosen to give a sound Bibliography and a reasonably good outline of supporting Notes.
Weak Points: Obviously, someone will find their favorite author(s) or research article(s) missing from the Bibliography: I thought his coverage of modern “wise people” left out a number of good Buddhist practitioners, for example. Hall has a non-scientific background, and few of his previous books directly cover much about Wisdom, so although you will gain a good starting perspective, you won’t be bogged down in depth.
Bottom Line: I thought this book gave an excellent vantage point from which to broadly survey a valuable part of our human nature, using accepted classical insights and modern scientific/economic explorations. His classification, and his discussion, seemed to be cogent and valuable, and it seems a good place to begin, rather than a comprehensive guide that tells you it knows everything about this subject. His last paragraph gives an interviewee’s plea to “leave some mystery [in the topic of Wisdom], and Hall has nicely obliged.”
Some other folks don’t quite feel as positive about it. Example: A reviewer named Seneca writes: “Some people think that the wisdom of ancient philosophers such as Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha will be confirmed if only it can be shown to be in harmony with moderns science, particularly psychology and neuroscience. I, to the contrary, think that Confucius Socrates and the Buddha are more profound and have more important things to say than all the world’s psychologists and neuroscientists put together. In other words, that the book, instead of being wise, is merely foolish.”
Adam Rourke also turned in an enlightening review (and skip this if you get my gist and don’t want to get bogged down in another long review):
In this book, Stephen S. Hall takes on one of life’s most perplexing questions. What is wisdom and how does this lump of gray matter we call a brain produce it. Drawing on the work of philosophers, theologians, and now scientists Mr. Hall attempts to synthesize all of their output into a coherent answer. Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this question for thousands of years but science has taken up the search much more recently. And it is the research done by neuroscientists that is the focus of this work.
The book itself is constructed in a fairly common style which consists of a series of well-known research papers embedded within a cluster of anecdotes. Mr. Hall seems to hold all of this research in more awe than it perhaps deserves. For when looked at dispassionately it can be seen that, while some of the work is first-rate, some comes off as mere hubris. The discovery that the mind has a biological base is hardly a revelation. Likewise finding out that sometimes people allow emotions to cloud their judgment is not much of a discovery either. For the problem that any scientific study faces is that wisdom is an experience not a thing and an experience is more suited to the dialectic of philosophy than to the reductionism of science. Discovering where an event is occurring is not the same thing as discovering what it is. One neuron firing is exactly like any other neuron firing. So how does this neuron firing create sight and another doing the identical thing create sound? Having said this it must be admitted that his sins are no greater than is common in an age that elevated science to the pedestal of all-knowing. As a Hindu sage once said, “Science does not explain reality, it explains it away” and while reading the various studies this saying keeps coming to mind.”
If you are not looking for deep insights into the soul of reality this is an entertaining even enlightening read. It takes the latest research in neuroscience pertaining to wisdom, compares it with philosophy and enter leavens it with anecdotes of such people as Gandhi. These anecdotes, in Gandhi’s case a description of his brief experience as a dandy on the streets of 19th Century London, are, to me at least, the most interesting parts of the book. Although he sometimes strays into academic jargon the book is, for the most part, clearly written in a style that anyone can understand and talks about questions that many people would be the better for thinking about. In the end, it may tell you where to find wisdom but it will not tell you how to get it.”
I think the best way I can add to the scope of the reviews of this book, and not belabor what these others have clearly said, is to share what I consider to be the best and most representative quotes about wisdom from this book. This is a good thing because you will probably not find these quotes about wisdom online much at all, as they are buried in this book and don’t lend themselves to a “feel-good, one-sentence wisdom blurb”, which is what many of the websites out there give you if you search on quotes about wisdom or wisdom quotes or the like.
So without further ado, I went through Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience and took out a hundred of the best quotes about wisdom the book has to offer. I believe you will be wiser if you put in a little time either digesting these quotations or reading the actual book. It was quite a task to read the book, type so many quotes about wisdom into a Word doc, and put them in this blog. So if you love wisdom, I hope you will make good use of the work Stephen and I have done to bring you these trenchant and terse tidbits and treasures of truth. Enjoy! (Note: I include a few quotes about wisdom that Hall includes in the book which are not his; in other words, he is quoting Socrates or Confucius, etc.)
In moments of exceptional challenge and uncertainty, we tend to ask, How did this happen? What could we have done to prevent this dire turn of events? This is another way of saying, I realize now, that we are always searching for wisdom, but all too often we are looking for it in the rearview mirror, sifting the past for clues to how we might have thought about the future in a different way.
We crave wisdom — worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves — precisely because it will help us lead a meaningful life as we count our days, because we hope it will guide our actions as we step cautiously into that always uncertain future. At times of challenge and uncertainty, nothing seems more important than wisdom…
We all aspire to have wisdom. Not necessarily because it will guarantee us happier, more fulfilling, better lives (although those have been worthy goals almost from the moment philosophers began to contemplate it), but because wisdom as a process can serve as a guide to helping us make the best possible decisions at junctures of great importance in our lives.
Decision making lies at the heart of wisdom, but it’s not the whole story. Making those decisions, in turn, draws on a subtle wave of intellectual, emotional, and social gifts — gathering information, discerning the reality behind artifice (especially when it comes to human nature), evaluating and editing that accumulated knowledge, listening to one’s heart and one’s head about what is morally right and socially just, thinking not only of oneself but others, thinking not only in the here and now but about the future.
All of us have an intuitive sense of what wisdom means and what constitutes wise behavior. In a rough, nonacademic sense (to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous opinion about pornography), we know it when we see it, even if we can’t define it.
The struggle to define wisdom is embedded in the texture of its philosophical, psychological, and cultural history. And every time we think about it, every time we make the mighty effort to pause and contemplate a potential role for wisdom in whatever we are about to do or say, we join that noble struggle and move a step closer to achieving it.
Wisdom begins with awareness, of the self and the world outside the self; it deepens with our awareness of the inherent tension between the inner “I” and the outer world.
To understand wisdom fully and correctly probably requires more wisdom than any of us have. (Robert J. Sternberg)
Every time I encountered a new definition of wisdom, or some argument from the psychological literature, I found myself considering my own life; my decisions, my values, my shortcomings, my choices in confronting difficult practical and moral dilemmas.
You are reading quotes about wisdom from the book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, on www.ValuesoftheWise.com
As soon as you are confronted with a definition of wisdom, however provisional or tentative, however debatable or howlingly inadequate, you are forced to view that definition through the prism of your own history and experience. Which is another way of saying that we all have a working definition of wisdom floating around in our heads, but we are rarely forced to consider it, or consult it, or challenge it, or amend it, much less apply any standard of wisdom to gauge our own behavior and decisions on a daily basis.
Simply put, thinking about wisdom forces you to think about the way you lead your life, just as reading about wisdom, I believe, forces you to wrestle with its meaning and implications. You might come to think of this exercise, as I have, as an enlightened form of self-consciousness, almost an armchair form of mindfulness or meditation that cannot help but inform our actions.
Many definitions of wisdom converge on recurrent and common elements: humility, patience, and a clear-eyed, dispassionate view of human nature and the human predicament, as well as emotional resilience, an ability to cope with adversity, and an almost philosophical acknowledgment of ambiguity and the limitations of knowledge. Like many big ideas, it’s also nettled with contradictions.
Wisdom is based upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet emotional detachment is indispensable. A wise act in one context may be sheer folly in another. These inherent contradictions do not fatally vex a potential definition of wisdom; rather, they are embedded in it.
One of the best ways to think about wisdom, in fact, is to try to identify those rare individuals who manage to reconcile these contradictions and still embody wisdom. These are (or once were) living, breathing, and, because they are human, imperfect definitions of wisdom, but they are also less abstract, more like wisdom in the flesh. We can learn a lot about wisdom from its exemplars, past and present.
In a profound sense, the figures we now celebrate for their wisdom often had a deeply adversarial relationship with the prevailing values of the societies in which they live.
Many of the wise people on the list needed to abandon conventional modes of life and thought to nurture the habit of mind for which they are now celebrated, which is often to tell society what it doesn’t want to hear: many were ostracized during their lifetime, while others were executed outright or assassinated.
Mandela and Gandhi were imprisoned; Confucius was unemployable; Socrates was put to death; even the closest friends of Jesus Christ, according to philosopher Karl Jaspers, viewed him as a madman. In its particular time and place, wisdom not only perturbs but often appears socially dangerous.
Wisdom clearly isn’t a trait conferred by a gene sequestered on the male Y chromosome. For every Solomon, there is a Sarah and an Esther; for every Pericles, there is an Apasia, his little-known mistress, who, according to Plutarch, was one of the wisest people in that wisest era of Greek civilization. For every Jesus, a Mary Magdalene; for every Mandela, an Aung San Suu Kyi, in the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is a She.
So why so few women? I don’t think there’s a dearth of female wisdom, just a painfully slow evolution in the cultural notion of wisdom and an equally painful and long-standing disenfranchisement of women from the public domain of wisdom for many centuries.
We can find useful provocations about the meaning of wisdom in the dialogues of Plato and in the proverbs of the Bible, in the lamentations of Saint Augustine and especially in the clear-eyed though often grumpy insights of Montaigne, who once declared, “The most manifest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness.” If by that he meant optimism about the future, he is backed up by neuroscientists, who have begun to find support for that notion.
Wisdom is apparent in the pronouncements of great leaders at moments of great historical challenge, but also in the quotidian reassurances and bits of advice shared by parents and children (a kind of wisdom that travels well in both directions, I might add.) We can find it at home, on the job, in solitude and amid a crowd, in places of worship, and sometimes even in the locker room (sportswriters have long appreciated the fact that there’s often more wisdom among losers than among winners).
You are reading quotes about wisdom from the book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Here is another blog about wisdom which features wisdom quotes.
If you ask scientists about the “science of wisdom,” you’ll get blank looks and rolled eyes. But if you ask about a specific, more “reductive” aspect of wisdom — emotional regulation, say, or delayed gratification or moral choice — suddenly there’s a lot more to talk about, think about, and, often, argue about.
The problem with reductionism is that, at the end of the day, you need and want to put all the parts back together. I can’t do that with wisdom; no one can. The best I can do is to respect its essential mystery while offering a peek at some of its neural gears.
Wisdom presumably has something to do with memory and reasoning, and our understanding of both has changed dramatically in recent years. Memory is not just one thing, but rather there are many different kinds of memory, and some forms of wisdom probably rely on types of memory we didn’t even know about before. In reasoning, we now know that emotion plays a major role in how we reason, and wisdom may have a lot to do with knowing when emotion is helpful and when it is not. (Stephen M. Kosslyn)
Wisdom requires an experience-based knowledge of the world (including, especially, the world of human nature). It requires mental focus, reflecting the ability to analyze and discern the most important aspects of the acquired knowledge, knowing what to use and what to discard, almost on a case-by-case basis (put another way, it requires knowing when to follow rules but also when the usual rules no longer apply). It requires meditating, refereeing, between the frequently conflicting inputs of emotion and reason, of narrow self-interest and broader social interest, of instant rewards or future gains. Moreover, it expresses itself through an insistently social vocabulary of interactive behavior: a fundamental sense of justice (which is sometimes described as an innate form of morality, of knowing right from wrong), a commitment to the welfare of social (and, for that matter, genetic) units that extend beyond the self, and an ability to defer immediate gratification in order to achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.
One of the most appealing things about wisdom is the elevated form of self-awareness it inspires.
Thinking about wisdom almost inevitably inspires you to think about yourself and your relationship with the larger world.
Could there be a “science” of wisdom? And if there is, can it provide us anything more at this point than a fuzzy geography of neural activity superimposed upon a vague definition of a human virtue?
As Peter Medawar, the British immunologist and Nobel laureate, once put it, science represents that rare balance of imagination and critical thinking that yields “rectifying” episodes that tell us whether a story that sounds good also rises to the level of truth.
Paul Baltes, in a wry bit of understatement, once described wisdom as “a topic at the interface between several disciplines: philosophy, sociology, theology, psychology, political science, and literature, to name a few.”
Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within. (Heraclitus)
From the time they were boys, Chaerephon had been a friend and, later, a disciple of the philosopher Socrates; indeed, both had been lampooned by Aristophanes in The Clouds as philosophic charlatans, and they shared many ideas about dialogue, disputation, and the steadfast, often impolitic pursuit of truth. Was anyone, Chaerephon asked the oracle, wiser than his old childhood friend? The oracle replied that no one exceeded the wisdom of Socrates.
Although he was formally charged with corrupting young people and refusing to believe in the Athenian gods, nothing less than Socrates’ lifelong pursuit of wisdom itself was on trial. Yet his greatest crime — or, perhaps, his greatest lapse in social judjudgment may well have been the deft, dispassionate inquisitions by which he established that so many of his judges and jurors were not nearly as wise as they thought.
Socrates managed to say something monumental in the history of human thought: that wisdom is a human virtue, won like all virtues by hard work, in this case the hard work of experience, error, intuition, detachment, and above all, critical thinking. It is counterintuitive, adversarial, unsentimental, demythologizing, anything but conventional. Most important, Socrates’ wisdom is secular, perhaps the highest form of human excellence any mortal can hope to achieve without the help of the gods (or God).
The Oracle’s puzzling declaration inspired Socrates to undertake what he called a “cycle of labors” to understand what exactly the god of Delphi had intended. “I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,” the philosopher told his accusers; “so what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world?”
As he walked away from the encounter, Socrates concluded that the politician “thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.” With this remark, Socrates defined an essential and indeed profound aspect of true wisdom: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge.
Countless books and endless commentary have been written about the trial of Socrates, yet one of its most astonishing features often goes unremarked. When was the last time a “trial of the century,” in any century, devoted so much public discussion to the meaning of wisdom? When was the last time a national conversation about the qualities of this elusive virtue became Topic A of its time and culture? When was the last time an entire society found itself debating the definition and importance of wisdom as if it were a matter of life and death (as it indeed was for Socrates)?
Karl Jaspers famously coined the phrase “Axial Age” to define that extraordinary historical moment, roughly between 800 B.C. and 200 B.C., when civilizations in the East and West gravitated around figures that represented new modes of thought and uniquely human paths to wisdom: Socrates in ancient Greece, of course, but also Confucius in feudal China and the Buddha in the Asian subcontinent (Jesus obviously arrived on the scene a little later).
Many of the essential elements we associate with wisdom were introduced as “evidence” at Socrates’ trial: the importance of humility, especially in acknowledging the limits of one’s knowledge and expertise; the importance of persistent, discomforting critical thinking and discernment (usually in the form of conversational questions) to unearth the truth; the importance of identifying and pursuing goodness; and, often underappreciated, the acceptance that true wisdom at some level is often an act of hostility against society.
This Socratic ideal of the closely examined, well-lived life placed cultural markers on the definition of wisdom that would not be redeemed, either by psychology or science, for millennia. But Socrates was not alone. In roughly the same remarkable period of ancient history, in every other significant corner of the civilized world, different but equally venerable schools of philosophy, each with its own definition of wisdom, began to flower.
You are reading quotes about wisdom from the book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. If you like to hold books in your hands, like I do, will you consider purchasing one of my books about wisdom?
As in the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha were grabbing and describing different parts of the same unwieldy beast, wisdom; unlike the blind men, it seems to me, they were so astute, so intuitive and supple of thought, that we can see outlines of the same animal emerging in their very separate and distinct philosophies, a point [Karl] Jaspers made at the conclusion of his short book [Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals]. “Their concern,” he wrote, “was not mere knowledge, but a transformation in men’s thinking and inward action.”
Confucius traveled widely in China in search of a job, and yet no one would hire him; when he died, historians of philosophy tell us, he felt his life had been a failure. And although the philosophy of Socrates (as filtered through the writings of Plato) has served as a template for assessing wisdom, the trial of Socrates reminds us that, even in his own time and among the hundreds of Athenian peers serving on his jury, wisdom could inspire intense social and political backlash.
The quest for wisdom is a physical as well as an intellectual undertaking. It often requires changes in scenery, thrives on commerce (which often promotes the exchange of ideas), and usually involves a journey. Whether it is Socrates making the rounds of Athens to interrogate politicians and poets, or the Buddha wandering through deer parks in northeast India to spread word of his awakening, or Confucius pounding the pavement in the twilight of his life in search of employment, the early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Humankind’s revolutionary emancipation from magical agency and capricious gods, like all emancipations, is a blessing and a burden. We are blessed by the freedom to think and decide for ourselves, but burdened by the responsibility that comes with human actions and their human consequences. If we humans control our own activities, it naturally follows that we are responsible for our own behavior, and, just as important, responsible for sanctioning others for their misbehavior.
Heraclitean wisdom began with the fact that reality is dynamic; the world as we thought we knew it in the past is sure to be different as we venture into the future. It changes; we change. And so, in his most famous metaphor, when we did our toe into a river, the river itself is different from the way it was just a moment ago, when our toe entered.
During a rare period of relative peace, after the defeat of Persia in 479 B.C. and prior to the start of the Peloponnesian Wars in 432 B.C., Athens enjoyed a pacific explosion of commerce, public building, the arts, and, of course, the practice of philosophy at the highest level. The City remade itself as an urban shrine to Wisdom, deified in the Parthenon, the great temple erected to honor Athena, the patroness of the city and goddess of wisdom. Philosophy assumed a central role in civic and cultural life; as Socrates told the jury at his trial, Athenians “belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength.
In a famous speech honoring soldiers who had died in the first skirmishes of the war between Athens and Sparta, Pericles spoke at length of the greatness of Athens at its peak in the fifth century B.C., and his remarks manage to capture a working definition of civic wisdom as it existed at the height of Greek civilization 2,500 years ago. He spoke of a uniquely Athenian talent for deliberation and decision making that, whether in the public domain in which he operated or in a more domestic setting, established a model for wisdom in action, one that probably strikes us as bracingly modern.
We Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. (Pericles)
In the Periclean formulation, wisdom was deliberative, judgmental, collective, reflective, and deeply social, rooted in conversation and disputation, steered by critical thinking. All these elements, in varying proportion, form a reasonably good working recipe for the kind of decision making that, even today, we likely would consider wise.
For all its celebrated enlightenment, Athens was not so enlightened a place that its citizens could resist putting the wisest man in the world to death. Plato used Socrates’ last moments on earth (in his dialogue Phaedo) as an occasion to reiterate his belief that the pursuit of wisdom was the highest human calling — and, perhaps, a mission more easily accomplished without the distractions of bodily desires.
The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything… That is why, on all these accounts, we have so little time for philosophy. Worst of all, if we do obtain any leisure from the body’s claims and turn to some line of inquiry, the body intrudes once more into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth. We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things in isolation with the soul in insolation. It’s likely, to judge from our argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead, and not in our lifetime. (Socrates)
If quotes about wisdom interest you as much as it seems like it does, at the bottom of this page you will find a podcast you are going to like!
In Plato’s account, Socrates essentially demonized and exiled emotion as a foe of wisdom, devaluing its importance, casting it as distraction and perturbation, setting it up for a philosophical reclamation project that would last more than a millennium.
Although standard histories locate the nativity of philosophy in Greece in the sixth century B.C., the dawn of the Axial Age rose first in the East. At least a century earlier than the Greek stirrings in Miletus, Eastern religions and belief systems had begun to coalesce around a somewhat different notion of knowledge, one that nonetheless anticipated contemporary concepts of wisdom. The Upanishads — formally committed to written form only around 800 – 500 B.C., roughly the same time frame of Homer and Hesiod — assembled poems and tales that offered the collective wisdom of saints and sages on a less material, almost ineffable plane of knowledge.
In numerous parts of the Analects, his collected sayings, Confucius reiterates a triad of foundational principles that he believes should guide the good life. Most important is goodness (or gen), which has become, arguably, one of the most powerful beacons illuminating human behavior in the history of civilization. In the Confucian hierarchy of virtue, even wisdom and courage were secondary to gen.
Many elements of Confucianism anticipate subsequent developments in Western philosophy — for example, the commitment to social justice in Greek society (“Not to act when justice commands, is cowardice,” Confucius wrote), and a moralism grounded in public virtue, with obvious precursors to Christian loving-kindness. “For Confucius, morality was all about involvement in society,” [Paul] Strathern writes. Confucius also emphasized the primacy of emotion (as it was expressed in compassion and intuition) over reason, and the melding of personal moral behavior with the larger political order.
Those who aspire to wisdom must be drawn to it, and seek it, not receive it as a government regulation, spiritual proclamation, or philosophic incitement to acceptable and virtuous thought.
To know what you know and know what you don’t know is the characteristic of one who knows. (Confucius)
Although Buddhism embraces “awakening,” not wisdom per se, the spiritual rewards that accompany this awakening translate well into the art of living that we have come to associate with wisdom: equanimity in dealing with the unknowability of answers, mastery over desire, the dampening of material selfishness, and an ability to thrive despite uncertainty. In a larger sense, however, Buddhism shared a crucially important conceptual shift with ancient Greek philosophy. Both philosophies shed divine authority as a source of knowledge, and both celebrated human-based insights into the nature of reality. True wisdom, both in the East and the West, begins with the individual.
In the modern psychological idiom (and, increasingly, in the idiom of contemporary neuroscience), the Fortunate One described cognitive and emotional qualities that could be reductively parsed and studied, including emotional regulation (lack of hostility), compassion, attention, and the elevated state of cognitive focus known as mindfulness.
Stay tuned for a Part II to the quotes about wisdom from Stephen S. Hall’s book, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience!
keywords: quotes about wisdom, wisdom quotes, philosophy quotes, quotes about science
