We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.
Samuel Smiles

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.
Samuel Smiles

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.
Samuel Smiles

Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
Samuel Smiles

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
Evelyn Waugh

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst.
Desiderius Erasmus

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.
Zhuang Zi

Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.
Robert Duvall

The beginning of wisdom is to desire it.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
Graham Greene

In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
Louis D. Brandeis

The all-seeing eye of God beheld our deplorable state; infinite pity touched the heart of the Father of mercies; and infinite wisdom laid the plan of our recovery.
David Brainerd

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.
Lord Chesterfield

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.
William Congreve

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
Margaret Fuller

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.
James Hillman

For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom'... I can't fathom my own heart.
Michael Caine

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
Horace