A Quote by Graham Greene

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Graham Greene

Quote Topics

Sad Wisdom Age Curiosity Morality Sense Withered

Quote Author

Graham Greene
British - Novelist
October 2, 1904 - April 3, 1991

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

Hunter S. Thompson

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

Saul Alinsky

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

Friedrich Nietzsche

With age comes common sense and wisdom.

Nas

The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung To their first fault, and withered in their pride.

Robert Browning

Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.

Jean Rhys

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

H. L. Mencken

I think people get confused about who Merlin is. It's not his age that makes him: it's wisdom, and wisdom is not necessarily linked to age. Definitely not in the same way in the world of 'Once Upon a Time.'

Elliot Knight

Poor Fred - he's actually working on a typo, and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree, and there's another place in the Old Testament - I think it-s in Psalms - where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags!

Thom Hartmann

Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.

Edward Hirsch

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

C. S. Lewis

Wisdom is a condition of consciousness rather than an attitude of mind. Wisdom is that state of being in which an individual finds himself when realization has tinctured and transmuted all attitudes and opinions. A wise man is one who has experienced wisdom, wisdom in this sense being a mystical experience.

Manly Hall

What's the trick? There are three of them: A sense of real purpose, a sense of humor, and a sense of constant curiosity. Keep using those to the grave because learning really never ends.

Liz Carpenter

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

Jane Addams

Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.