Wisdom
The highest knowledge of first causes and of how to live well.
Works to read
- The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, 1511 · Great Books
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story) by George MacDonald, 1875
- Euthydemus by Plato, c. 384 BC · Great Books
- Experience and Education by John Dewey, 1938 · Great Books
- Aesop's Fables by Aesop, c. 6th century BCE (Townsend trans. 1867)
- The Satires of Horace and Persius by Horace and Persius, c. 35–30 BCE / c. 60 CE
- Essays by Francis Bacon, 1597-1625
- Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, 1732-1790
- The Burke-Paine Debate on the French Revolution by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, 1790-1791
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle, 1903
Passages
Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development
— Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled
— Aeschylus, The Oresteia
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
without dowry" compensates for want of beauty, youth, birth, honour, wisdom, and probity
— Molière, The Miser and The Would-Be Gentleman
Christian religion seems to have a kind of alliance with folly and in no respect to have any accord with wisdom
— Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
PROP. LXVII. A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: wisdom, wise, folly. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.