Enjoy great quotations, enhancing commentaries and, hopefully, lively discussions that will contribute to you becoming wiser and more insightful about achieving and experiencing meaningful success in life.
You need wisdom, and not just information and academic knowledge to succeed in life. Without wisdom, all the good grades or even money in the world will not necessarily bring you happiness and well-being, and instead, they could become a major source or pressure, anxiety, frustration, and disappointment.
Wisdom teaches us the foundations of living a successful life:
- Having a moral compass and foundation for standing firm during any storm in life.
- The importance of making thoughtful value-based judgments and choices
- The priority of developing worthwhile qualities of mind and spirit, like self-understanding, compassion, love, peace of mind, and a positive sense of well-being.
- The values of personal development, like good character, self-mastery, and the ongoing learning and use of wisdom.
Knowledge is primarily about having information, facts, and theories, while wisdom is primarily about living with a moral compass, exercising sound judgments of priorities and consequences, learning from experience and experiencing life with a thoughtful, constructive and insightful state of mind and spirit.
“The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.” (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
The first point of wisdom is to discern that which is false; the second, to know that which is true. (Lactantius)
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.” (Charles Dickens)
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. (Leo Buscaglia)
“Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.” (Dorothy Day)
“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.” (Daniel Defoe)
“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)
“Knowledge is knowing what to say. Wisdom is knowing when or whether or not to say it.” (Unknown)
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goether
Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.
Leo Tolstoy
There are plenty of people who are knowledgeable, but not particularly wise. It is quite possible, in fact, to be both knowledgeable and foolish (or even evil) at the same time. While knowledge can help you get ahead in the world in terms of certain kinds of accomplishments, it is primarily by developing wisdom that one is able to live a good life, experienced with peace of mind and a sense of well-being.
