W. H. Davies Quotes

After you get what you want you don't want it.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

Like other men, I have sought honours and preferment, and often have obtained them beyond my wishes or hopes. Yet never have I found in them that content which I had figured beforehand in my mind. A strong reason, if we well consider it, why we should disencumber ourselves of vain desires.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Some people will always be disappointed.

Promising is not giving, but serves to content fools.

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man knows he's playing.

I think, for myself, life lied to me.

The man who realizes his ignorance has taken the first step toward knowledge.

Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know', and thou shalt progress.

He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty.

I would be a poorer person if the only things I knew were what I had found out for myself.

Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.

And I like asking questions, to keep learning; people with big egos might not want to look unsure.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

My dreams have become puny with the reality my life has become.

If you're alive for more than five minutes, you're going to be disappointed.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

When I left, I had learnt nothing. I took nothing with me. At least, that's what I thought then.

But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

The doer alone learneth.