Wisdom and Ignorance

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

Luciano Pavarotti, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Blaise Pascal, in Wisdom and Ignorance

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Ellen Parr, in Wisdom and Ignorance

You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.

Dorothy Parker, (when asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence), in Wisdom and Ignorance

Beware the man of one book.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in Science and Religion and Wisdom and Ignorance

You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.

George Orwell, in Wisdom and Ignorance

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

Robert J. Oppenheimer, (on Albert Einstein), in Wisdom and Ignorance

We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Anaïs Nin, in Wisdom and Ignorance

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Anaïs Nin, in Happiness and Misery and Wisdom and Ignorance

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Too clever is dumb.

Ogden Nash, in Wisdom and Ignorance

The masses have little time to think. And how incredible is the willingness of modern man to believe.

Benito Mussolini, in Law and Politics and Wisdom and Ignorance

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges, "El informe de Brodie", in Wisdom and Ignorance

Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination

Petronius Arbiter, The Satyricon, XCIV, in Wisdom and Ignorance

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors... Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote but has the decency of not publishing.

Jorge Luis Borges, in Wisdom and Ignorance

In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything.

Ashleigh Brilliant, Brilliant Thoughts (copyright info: www.ashleighbrilliant.com), in Wisdom and Ignorance

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

Learning to shrug is the beginning of wisdom.

Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Growing old is not growing up.

Doug Horton, in Life and Death and Wisdom and Ignorance

Sloppy thinking gets worse over time.

Jenny Holzer, in Wisdom and Ignorance