Top 1200 Wisest Man Quotes & Sayings

[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing... it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

Continue to be bold, courageous. Try to choose the wisest thing and once you've chosen the wisest thing go out and try to achieve it. Be it.

The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so.

A knife of the keenest steel requires the whetstone, and the wisest man needs advice.

The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant.

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.

Nature hath nothing made so base, but can read some instruction to the wisest man.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance,' and I have found his words true.

A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.

Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.

The wisest man may be a blind father.

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom; he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

I thought Keith Raniere was the greatest, wisest, most brilliant man on Earth. I had no idea what was going on with the women and everything that came out in the FBI's investigation.

A child can ask a thousand questions that the wisest man cannot answer.

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.

The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most.

I have had and still do have every confidence in Paul Nitze, a man whom I have known for decades, one of the wisest servants of the American nation but always willing and capable of taking into account the interests of their allies, whoever: the British, or the French or the Germans or others.

The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest.

Mountain gorses, do ye teach us . . . . That the wisest word man reaches Is the humblest he can speak?

On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.

There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.

The wisest man is he who can account for his actions.

The wisest man knows he know nothing.

The wisdom of God exceeds that of the wisest man, more than his wisdom exceeds that of a child. If a child were to conjecture how an army is to be formed in the day of battle--how a city is to be fortified, or a state governed--what chance has he to guess right? As little chance has the wisest man when he pretends to conjecture how the planets move in their courses, how the sea ebbs and flows, and how our minds act upon our bodies.

Remember that the greatest fool in the world may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

The wisest man the warl' e'er saw, He dearly loved the lasses, O.

There was a time when I believed in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending. Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality, and aimed at goodness more than greatness.

Haste is productive of injury, and so is too much hesitation. He is the wisest man who does everything at the proper time.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.

Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven - of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best.

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.

It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---

Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great.

O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.

Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.