Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Knowledge is the life of the mind.

The wise are not learned, the learned are not wise.

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

I'd like to be very wise.

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

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.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Wit does not take the place of knowledge.

Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark.

The wise speak only of what they know

A great thing is a great book; but a greater thing than all is the talk of a great man.

For there is assuredly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom, and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that.

And he is oft the wisest manWho is not wise at all.