Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.

As you mature, you start reading and studying and researching, you start to really know what life is about.

Everything is an experience. You learn something different from everything you do.

True knowledge lies in knowing how to live.

Many roads lead to the path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with Truth.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Wise men don't need concrete answers. By definition, they need wisdom." ~ Geraki

Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

I once read that people who study others are wise but those who study themselves are enlightened.

Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example - master-slave, caste, and gender relations - have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

The wise speak only of what they know

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

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?