Leo Strauss Quotes

Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.

Who think themselves most wise are greatest fools

The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.

He who considers himself a paragon of wisdom is sure to commit some superlatively stupid act.

Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

They are so knowing, that they know nothing.

Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press.

I'm just another guy who thinks he's smarter than he is, in a long line of them.

For one thing, when you're playing as well as I was at the time, you think you can play with anything. That isn't true, of course, but I didn't know it then.

The worst thing you could ever get is people who think they know everything.

It's what a fellow thinks he knows that hurts him.

They are most deceived that trusteth most in themselves.

The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.

When you think you're a really good person, you're actually capable of doing some real harm to people, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's the big little lie that we all live in.

There is a danger in believing your own hype.

We think we know what's right. With excessive pride comes blindness.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

To be proud of knowledge is to be blind with light.

People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise.

Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!

Why was it that pride and foolishness were so often close companions?

He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.

There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.

Even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.