He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

I will say this: one of the things that is a pain when you’re expecting children is how much advice unsolicited people give you when you’re not asking for it.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

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

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

General consultant to mankind.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Character develops itself in the stream of life.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that’s worthwhile, that they’re going to be proud to show to friends and family.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.