Wise Quotes about Plainness

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be
clearer in his absence,
as the mountain to the climber
is clearer from the plain.
- Khalil Gibran

Exotic or ordinary, glamorous or plain,
exciting or boring - it's all in our point-of-view.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Nature will bear the closest inspection.
She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf,
and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau

I am a plain ordinary magnificent creation of God,
just like every other plain ordinary
mountain, ocean, tree, animal, and human.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Few people know how to take a walk.
The qualifications are endurance,
plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature,
good humor, vast curiosity, good speech,
good silence and nothing too much.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tombs are the clothes of the dead.
A grave is a plain suit;
while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Flying might not be all plain sailing,
but the fun of it is worth the price.
- Amelia Earhart

It is a wonderful advantage to a man,
in every pursuit or avocation,
to secure an adviser in a sensible woman.
In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact,
and a plain soundness of judgement,
which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man.
A woman, if she be really your friend,
will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute.
She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing:
for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Let children walk with Nature,
let them see the beautiful blendings
and communions of death and life,
their joyous inseparable unity,
as taught in woods and meadows,
plains and mountains and streams
of our blessed star,
and they will learn that death
is stingless indeed,
and as beautiful as life.
- John Muir

There are trivial truths and there are great truths.
The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false.
The opposite of a great truth is also true.
- Niels Bohr

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat,
for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator,
while the wolf denounces him for the same act
as the destroyer of liberty,
especially as the sheep was a black one.
Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed
upon a definition of the word liberty;
and precisely the same difference
prevails today among us human creatures
- Abraham Lincoln

Most truths are so naked
that people feel sorry for them
and cover them up,
at least a little bit.
- Edward R. Murrow

The personal life deeply lived
always expands into truths beyond itself.
- Anais Nin

Quotations help us remember the simple yet profound truths
that give life perspective and meaning.
- Criswell Freeman

All truths are easy to understand
once they are discovered;
the point is to discover them.
- Galileo Galilei

Advertisements contain the only truths
to be relied on in a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson

When you are tempted to judge,
may you be reminded that we are ALL ONE,
and that every thought you think reverberates
across the universe touching everyone and everything.
- from the Simple Truths movie May You Be Blessed

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
- Thomas Jefferson

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions,
but laws and institutions must go hand in hand
with the progress of the human mind.
As that becomes more developed, more enlightened,
as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered
and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances,
institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
- Thomas Jefferson [inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial]

Don't hurry. Don't worry.
You're only here for a short visit.
So don't forget to stop and smell the roses.
- Walter Hagen

A wise man will make haste to forgive,
because he knows the true value of time,
and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
- Samuel Johnson

Life is truly known only to those who suffer,
lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
- Anais Nin

Trust yourself. Only you can live your life.
Only you can taste your victories.
Only you can suffer the sting of your defeats.
Make your own choices, and accept your own consequences -
for better or worse.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Far better is it to dare mighty things,
to win glorious triumphs,
even though chequered by failure,
than to take rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy much nor suffer much,
because they live in the grey twilight
that knows not victory or defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt

The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer.
The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy.
Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.
- don Miguel Ruiz

The "stories" we choose to tell about our past
are never what a video camera would have recorded.
We can tell a sad story or a happy story,
and neither story is either
more accurate or "better" than the other story.
The difference is that one story causes us to suffer,
while the other brings us joy. I choose joy.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike.
Each has their suffering.
Some suffer too much, others too little.
- The Buddha

Whenever you choose to carry resentment and hatred,
you are shouldering an immense burden that damages
your happiness, and often your health.
Does it matter that your resentment and hatred are "justified?"
Only you suffer - not the person you resent.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

All men and women are born, live, suffer and die;
what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams,
whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things,
and what we do to make them come about.
We do not choose to be born.
We do not choose our parents.
We do not choose our historical epoch,
the country of our birth,
or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.
We do not, most of us, choose to die;
nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death.
But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
- Joseph Epstein

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
- Leonardo da Vinci

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love.
But then one suffers from not loving.
Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer;
to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love.
To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy.
Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love
or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
I hope you're getting this down.
- the movie Love and Death

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life.
Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.
- Albert Einstein

Mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed.
- Thomas Jefferson

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks.
Perhaps this person will never
be disappointed or disillusioned;
perhaps she won't suffer the way
people do when they have a dream to follow.
But when the person looks back -
and at some point everyone look back -
she will hear her heart, saying,
"What have you done with the miracles
that God planted in your days?
What have you done with the talents
God bestowed on you?"
- Paulo Coelho

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man
... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do
every minute of every day. And the invisible man
has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do.
And if you do any of these things,
he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire
and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever,
and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream,
until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you.
He loves you and he needs money.
- George Carlin

Wise men put their trust in ideas
and not in circumstances
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance;
the wise grows it under his feet.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

Early to bed and early to rise,
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- Benjamin Franklin

The wise man looks into space,
and does not regard the small as too little,
nor the great as too much;
for he knows that there is no limit to dimensions.
- Lao Tzu

All this worldly wisdom was once
the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
- Henry David Thoreau

See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.
- Japanese pictorial maxim (the Three Wise Monkeys)

It is always wise to look ahead,
but difficult to look further than you can see.
- Winston Churchill

The wise man looks back into the past,
and does not grieve over what is far off,
nor rejoice over what is near;
for he knows that time is without end.
- Lao Tzu

It is noted that a stopped clock is correct twice each day.
In a similar manner, a person who is unchanging appears wise occasionally.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question
than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.
You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
- Naguib Mahfouz

I have always been regretting that
I was not as wise as the day I was born.
- Henry David Thoreau

Take risks: if you win, you will be happy;
if you lose, you will be wise.
- Anonymous

If you wish to succeed in life,
make perseverance your bosom friend,
experience your wise counselor,
caution your elder brother,
and hope your guardian genius.
- Joseph Addison

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere,
while the pessimist sees only the red stoplight.
The truly wise person is colorblind.
- Albert Schweitzer

Thoughtful people seldom share exactly the same opinion -
the same point-of-view.
The wise ones understand that they know nothing -
for virtually none of our experience is truly factual -
and they graciously honor all other opinions.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Before beginning a Hunt, it is wise to ask someone
what you are looking for before you begin looking for it.
- A. A. Milne (Winnie-The-Pooh)

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is,
he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
- Helen Keller

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought,
sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.
- The Buddha

The wise man does not lay up his own treasures.
The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.
- Lao Tzu

He is a wise man who does not grieve
for the things which he has not,
but rejoices for those which he has.
- Epictetus

Self-pity is our worst enemy
and if we yield to it,
we can never do anything wise in this world.
- Helen Keller

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Wisdom Quotes