Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

Being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

I'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.

It's an ear job, not an eye job.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

I don't put the focus on things that don't matter.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

If every player is on the left, and I am on the right, you need to trust me that I have seen something the other players have not seen.

I pay attention to the things that nobody else is looking at.

People never notice anything.

You mustn't underestimate an audience's intelligence.

Interest makes some people blind, and others quick-sighted.

Wisdom sails with wind and time.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

You can only do so many things great, and you should cast aside everything else.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.

An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.