Worldly Wisdom Quotes

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

Learn to live in this world with self-respect.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Pure, holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.

I've been around a long time. I've seen it all before.

I'm trying to learn from various corners of the world.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

I will laugh at the world! Never will I allow myself to become so important, so wise, so dignified, so powerful, that I forget how to laugh at myself and my world.And so long as I can Laugh never will I be poor

He who best knows the world will love it least.

The most practical, the most dignified way of going on in the world is to take people at their word, when you have no positive reason to the contrary.

Gabriel: Bethany lacks understanding about the ways of the world. She still has much to learn and that makes her vulnerable." Beth: "Do you have to make me sound like a full-time babysitting project?" Xavier: "I happen to be an experienced babysitter. I can show you my resume if you'd like.

For being book smart, I thought he (A. Barlett Giamatti) had a lot of street smarts, which is tough to find sometimes.

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Cynicism is carnality that thinks its smart.

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

A wise man’s country is the world.

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

I find that to be a fool as to worldly wisdom, and to commit my cause to God, not fearing to offend men, who take offence at the simplicity of truth, is the only way to remain unmoved at the sentiments of others.