Wisdom and Ignorance

The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.

Josh Billings, in Wisdom and Ignorance

I will tell you the truth as soon as I figure it out.

Wayne Birmingham, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Knowledge and belief are two separate tracks that run parallel to each other and never meet, except in the child.

Godfried Bomans, Buitelingen II, in Science and Religion and Wisdom and Ignorance

To use a method is to compare the realm of mind to a stool. The true thinker walks freely.

Godfried Bomans, De avonturen van Bill Clifford, in Science and Religion and 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

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

Jorge Luis Borges, "El informe de Brodie", 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

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Henry Peter Brougham, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgement.

Rita Mae Brown, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

Sam Brown, (Washington Post, 1977), in Wisdom and Ignorance

It costs to be stupid. The stupider you are, the more it costs.

Sherrill Brown, in Wisdom and Ignorance

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Buddha, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Less than fifteen percent of the people do any original thinking on any subject... The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.

Luther Burbank, in Wisdom and Ignorance

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Robert Burton, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Ignorance is the mother of devotion.

Robert Burton, in Science and Religion and Wisdom and Ignorance

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

Samuel Butler, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

Theodor W. Adorno, in Wisdom and Ignorance

Beware the man of one book.

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

Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination

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

The wise learn many things from their enemies.

Aristophanes, The Birds, 414 B.C., in Wisdom and Ignorance