A Quote by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

We can be wise from goodness and good from wisdom.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Quote Topics

Good Goodness Wisdom Wise

Quote Author

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Austrian - Writer
September 13, 1830 - March 12, 1916

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Robert A. Heinlein

... The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.

David Hume

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Thornton T. Munger

Far best is he who is himself all-wise, and he, too, good who listens to wise words; But whoso is not wise or lays to hear another's wisdom is a useless man.

Hesiod

Without goodness a man cannot endure adversity for long, nor can he enjoy prosperity for long. The good man is naturally at ease with goodness. The wise man cultivates goodness for its advantage.

Confucius

Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical.

George Sarton

The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I was born wise. Street-wise, people-wise, self-wise. This wisdom was my birthright.

Sophia Loren

It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.

Felix Adler

Much has seen said of the wisdom of old age. Old age is wise, I grant, for itself, but not wise for the community. It is wise in declining new enterprises, for it has not the power nor the time to execute them; wise in shrinking from difficulty, for it has not the strength to overcome it; wise in avoiding danger, for it lacks the faculty of ready and swift action, by which dangers are parried and converted into advantages. But this is not wisdom for mankind at large, by whom new enterprises must be undertaken, dangers met, and difficulties surmounted.

William C. Bryant

God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!--Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!--what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

Matthew Arnold

How can you go wrong with two people in love? If a good boy loves a good girl, good. If a good boy loves another good boy, good. And if a good girl loves the goodness in good boys and good girls, then all you have is more goodness, and goodness has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Fiona Apple

Good -humor is goodness and wisdom combined.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

God doth not govern the world only by his will as an absolute monarch, but by his wisdom and goodness as a tender father. It is not his greatest pleasure to show his sovereign power, or his inconceivable wisdom, but his immense goodness, to which he makes the other attributes subservient.

Stephen Charnock

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.