Wisdom

Essentially, if you think too much, you cut off your mind from the wisdom of your feelings. This may sound a little esoteric — and a bit surprising coming from someone like me who strives to rid my thinking of irrationality — but it is not. Emotions form in the brain, just as crystal-clear, rational thoughts do. They are merely a different form of information processing — more primordial, but not necessarily an inferior variant. In fact, sometimes they provide the wiser counsel.

We need more knowledge, and must submit to a heavy stress upon science in education and government, for we are subject to international challenges that force us to keep pace with every technological advance. But we need something more than knowledge; we need the wisdom and character to use our knowledge with foresight and caution, with both resolution and restraint. What is character? It is a rational harmony and hierarchy of desires in coordination with capacity. What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to the present problems, a view of the part in light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.

He who learns must suffer. Against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of enduring pain. Suffering can be virtuous, nothing worth doing well can be done without a bit of strife.

Like the statesmen he had written about (Metternich, Castlereagh, Bismarck), Kissinger felt that “the beginning of wisdom in human as well as in international affairs was knowing when to stop.”

The problem of most of previous periods was that purposes outran knowledge. The challenge of our period is the opposite: knowledge is far outrunning purposes. The task for the US therefore is not only to reconcile its power and its morality but to temper its faith with wisdom.

Wisdom is a bitter-sweet delight, deepened by the very discords that enter into its harmony.

Growth in philosophical understanding, or just plain wisdom, is always a matter of being able to distinguish between levels of truth and frame of reference, at the same time being able to see one’s own life in its intimate relation to these differing and ever more universal levels. Above all, there is the level beyond levels, the boundless frame of universal nature, which, however impossible to describe, is the self-determining and spontaneous ground of our being and our freedom. The degree of freedom and self-determination varies with the level which we realize to be our self — the source from which we act. As our sense of self is narrow, the more we feel our existence as restraint. For when we stand with our nature, seeing that there is nowhere to stand against it, we are at last able to move unmoved.

The beginning of wisdom in politics is attention to signs of change. As a theatre of illusion, politics does not reveal its meanings to the careless eye. Reality and illusions are central categories of political study. The problem begins with the very names of institutions. The dominance of Western fashions means that every country now has a kind of politics, and a complement of institutions — parliaments, constitutions, schedules of rights, trade unions, courts, newspapers, ministers, and so on — which suggests that the same kind of thing is going on all over the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not unknown for politicians to lie, but much more confusing is the complex relation between names and reality.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment, but again that is only the beginning of wisdom, as doubt is the beginning of philosophy; it is not also the end and fulfillment. The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.

History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance — “unknown” — are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.

Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.

While knowledge can be learned, wisdom must be acquired. Knowing is having the right words; wisdom is knowing when and how to say them — and when to keep them to yourself.

When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions. As solitude diminishes, so, too, does fortitude — not only to develop convictions but also to be faithful to them, particularly when they require the traversing of novel, and thus often lonely, roads. Only convictions — in combination with wisdom — enable people to access and explore new horizons.

We both came to Google as seasoned business executives who were pretty confident in our intellect and abilities. But over the humbling course of a decade, we came to see the wisdom in John Wooden’s observation that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” We had a front-row seat as we helped our founders and colleagues create a magnificent company and used it to relearn everything we thought we knew about management.

Yet the choice which confronts the diplomat is not between legality and illegality, but between political wisdom and political stupidity.

Neither science nor ethics nor politics can resolve the conflict between politics and ethics into harmony. We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is, according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment.

It is easy for the policy of bluff to succeed in the short run, but in the long run it can succeed only if it is able to postpone forever the test of actual performance, and this even the highest quality of statecraft cannot assure.

The best that luck and political wisdom can do is to use the initial success of a policy of bluff for the purpose of bringing the actual power of one’s nation up to its reputed quality.

Wisdom: sagacity, sageness, intelligence, understanding, insight, perception, perceptiveness, penetration, acuity, discernment, sense, good sense, common sense, shrewdness, astuteness, acumen, smartness, judiciousness, judgment, foresight, clear-sightedness, prudence, circumspection.

We use our past effectively when it helps us repeat desirable — and avoid repeating undesirable — experiences. We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why. Why is wisdom. Why enables us to avoid making the same mistake again and again, and if we are fortunate helps us repeat our success.

Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations (“things should be made better, not worse”) to perform it properly. It requires the willingness to confront error, forthrightly, and to determine at what point and why departure from the proper path occurred. It requires the willingness to change, which is almost always indistinguishable from the decision to leave something (or someone, or some idea) behind. Therefore, the simplest response imaginable is to look away and refuse to think, while simultaneously erecting unsurmountable impediments to genuine communication.

But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble. Furthermore, if you have an escape route, there will not be enough heat generated in the chamber you find yourself jointly trapped in to catalyze the change necessary in both of you — the maturation, the development of wisdom — because maturation and the development of wisdom require a certain degree of suffering, and suffering is escapable as long as there is an out.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Perhaps another word for common sense is wisdom. Aristotle once defined wisdom as an equal combination of experience plus reflection. He suggested that you need to, first, have the experience and, second, take an equal amount of time to think about what happened to you and what you could learn from it.

The problem for most people is that they simply do not take enough time for reflection. They do not take the time to sit, write, think, and dialogue with others about their experiences.

Socrates once said that “We only learn something by dialoguing about it.” You only really understand something to the degree to which you can discuss it with others or explain it to a third party. Your ability to translate your experience into words, which only comes through thinking and reflection, is essential for your growth and wisdom and common sense.

But the beginning of wisdom consists of recognizing that a balance needs to be struck. However powerful America is, no country has the capacity to impose all its preferences on the rest of mankind; priorities must be established.

Man ‘limited by his nature’ is ‘infinite in his desires.’ The world is thus full of opposing forces. Of course, human wisdom has often succeeded in preventing these rivalries from degenerating into murderous conflicts. But the competition of efforts is the condition of life… In the last analysis as always, it is only in equilibrium that the world will find peace.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.

For Mill, the acknowledgement of his or her own fallibility is part of what makes someone a serious thinker. Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered — if necessary seeking these objections out — that we have any right to think of our judgment as better than another’s.

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief. The philosophers four parent-century were almost as unhappy as the composers: the began with Schopenhauer, who wrote an encyclopedia of misery, and ended with Nietzsche, who loved life because it was a tragedy, but went insane with the thought that he might have to live it again.

Consciousness = Energy = Love = Awareness = Light = Wisdom = Beauty = Truth = Purity.

All these doctrines culminate in Lao’s conception of the sage. It is characteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints of of sages, not so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious devotee but the mature and quiet mind. Even of the Tao and wisdom the wise man does not speak, for wisdom can never be transmitted by words, only by example and experience. If the wise man knows more than other men he tries to conceal it. He attaches no importance to riches or power, but reduces his desires to an almost Buddhist minimum.

To operate realistically in the brutal world of social interaction required the acceptance of uncertainty, which was wisdom, not the false assurances of science. And wisdom was reserved not for those plunged into events with the certitude of the fanatic but for those statesmen who maintained their distance, their irony, through a sense of the tragic. For Morgenthau, the ideal statesman was Lincoln, “a man of unique greatness,” whose fatalistic detachment allowed him to view the events and people (himself included) with objectivity, humility, and compassion. Lincoln’s ironic humor was inextricably linked to his melancholy separateness. Morgenthau viewed Henry Kissinger as another statesman who possessed a sense of humor and a sense of irony, who exhibited a fatalistic detachment linked to melancholy separateness.

Intellectuals were important to policymaking, providing concepts and perspective, but they operated on the basis of different values from politicians. Scholars engaged with ideas, their aim was to be as intelligent as they could and to present their arguments cogently. Statesmen had different goals. The intellectual seeks truth, the politician power. But Morgenthau was quick to add that this difference did not make the intellectual superior to the politician because power was an inescapable reality while the abstruse pursuit of truth carried burdens of its own. The politicians was obliged to deal with facts, not theories, and facts had a tendency to “make mincemeat of the wrong ideas.” Intellectuals could be very smart without necessarily being especially wise, or even wise at all. The politician required “practical wisdom,” whereas the scholar or intellectual “may be intelligent without being wise in the ways of the world.”

Morgenthau called wisdom “the approximation to justice which true statecraft discovers.” Kissinger no doubt agreed with Morgenthau that wisdom could not be taught like knowledge or accumulate like information; it probably could not even be defined with any precision, because it was “the gift of intuition.” Still, it could be recognized — you knew when you saw it. But that meant you had to be willing to see it, to grant that it exists. Because it was an elitist, hierarchical concept that didn’t fit comfortably into an egalitarian age (not everyone could be wise or could hope to be wise), Morgenthau lamented that the recognition of wisdom “has well-nigh disappeared from our culture.”

Where there are in fact “frontiers of knowledge” — that is, where the known and unknown can be delineated, as in the natural sciences (generally) — I do not think your statement is true. Your comment here seems most applicable when the “frontiers” cannot be discerned and “knowledge” is not the goal — but rather wisdom, perception, judgment, conception.

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.

And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect. The relativists of my generation and Jordan’s, many of whom became professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passe, “not relevant” or even “oppressive.” They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

According to Spengler and Kissinger, it is at the moment when the “causality-men” and the “fact-men” take over that a civilization is in most danger. As the dreams, myths, and risk taking of an earlier creative period fall away, intellectuals, political leaders, and even priests become predominantly concerned with the question not of why but how. The intuitive dimensions of wisdom get tossed aside, technocratic procedure overwhelms purpose, and information is mistaken for wisdom. “Vast bureaucratic mechanisms develop a momentum and a vested interest of their own.”

Western culture was history’s highest expression of technical reason: it “views the whole world,” Kissinger wrote, “as a working hypothesis.” The “machine” was its great symbol, a “perpeteum mobile” — a perpetual motion machine that asserted relentless “mastery over nature.” And the vastly powerful and obsessively efficient US was the West’s vanguard.

This has been interpreted to mean that the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how little one truly knows.

Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth. For the majority of us it is the only period of life in which we live; most men of forty are but a reminiscence, the burnt-out ashes of what was once a flame. The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait! — “If youth knew how, and old age could!”

To this pass knowledge, science, and wisdom. For 70 years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart though suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; 70 years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his throat.

Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more “social justice” than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

If survival is the test of wisdom, the significance of life is merely time: we go on in order to keep going on. Our attitude to experience seems to be one of perpetual hunger, for even when we are satisfied and delighted to be alive we keep calling for more.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. The principles of scientific reason are always simple, consistent, and abstract; the social world is always complicated, incongruous, and concrete. To apply the former to the latter is either futile, in that the social reality remains impervious to the attack of that “one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth”; or it is fatal, in that it will bring about results destructive of the intended purpose. Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman. The social world, deaf to the appeal to reason pure and simple, yields only to that intricate combination of moral and material pressures which the art of statesman creates and maintains.

Wisdom is about understanding how to act and feel appropriately. Wisdom includes excellent deliberation, healthy judgment, perspective, and good sense. It opposes the vice of folly or thoughtlessness.

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Nobody does wrong willingly.

If people lie, it’s because they think this will benefit them. If people steal, they think it’s the best thing to do. If people are mean, they somehow have the impression that’s how they get the most out of the situation.

They lack certain wisdom. They don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. And even if they know what they’re doing might be wrong, they’re still mistaken and think it’ll be to their advantage.

The point is, they don’t do wrong on purpose. They just don’t understand any better.

All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew “more and more about less and less,” and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more. The specialist put on blinders in order to shut out from his vision all the world but one little spot, to which he glued his nose. Perspective was lost. “Facts” replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom. The common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.

Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.

Peers are good to hear from but if you all have about the same experience level there won’t be much wisdom injected into the critique. Wisdom comes from experience. You’d be best served by someone with more experience and wisdom than you.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. Charles Munger tells us about the importance of eliminating nonsense: “Part of having uncommon sense, I think, is being able to tune out folly, as distinguished from recognizing wisdom. You’ve got whole categories of things you just bat away so your brain isn’t cluttered with them. That way, you’re better able to pick up a few sensible things to do.”

With great wisdom comes great sorrow.

Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.

Psycanics defines wisdom as the ability to foresee the consequences of action.

These frescoes were visual equivalents of the effects of isolation on the human mind: a loss of proportion, an obsession with detail combined with an inability to see the larger picture, a kind of extravagant ugliness that no longer communicates.

You were not born with judgment. That comes only with experience.

Wisdom is commonly understood as the ability to apply knowledge, experience, and insight in a way that leads to sound judgment, good decision-making, and a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. It involves a combination of intelligence, critical thinking, empathy, self-awareness, and an appreciation for the complexities and nuances of life.

Here are a few key aspects of wisdom:

Knowledge and Understanding: Wisdom is built upon a foundation of knowledge and understanding of various subjects, including both factual information and a deeper comprehension of the human condition.
Experience: Wisdom often comes from direct personal experience or learning from the experiences of others. It involves reflecting on past events, understanding the lessons learned, and applying those insights to current situations.
Perspective: Wise individuals possess a broad perspective and are able to consider multiple viewpoints and possibilities. They can see beyond immediate circumstances and take a long-term view.
Emotional Intelligence: Wisdom involves an awareness and understanding of one’s own emotions as well as the emotions of others. It includes empathy, compassion, and the ability to manage and regulate emotions effectively.
Humility: Wisdom is often accompanied by humility. Wise individuals acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge and are open to learning from others. They are willing to admit when they are wrong and adjust their beliefs or actions accordingly.
Ethical Behavior: Wisdom is closely connected to ethical behavior. Wise individuals make decisions that align with principles of fairness, justice, integrity, and respect for others.
Continuous Learning and Growth: Wisdom is not a static state but a lifelong pursuit. It involves a willingness to continually learn, grow, and adapt to new information, perspectives, and challenges.

Conventional wisdom holds that “since war plans to tend to cover only the first act, the national leadership, in opting for war, will in fact be choosing a plan without an ending.” To preclude being entrapped in a prolonged conflict, the Chinese leadership implemented restraints to both the means and ends of warfare.

Wisdom is the supreme part of a man, and makes him most resemble God.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge.

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Please do not expect any new system of philosophy, nor any world-shaking cogitations; these will be human confessions, not divine revelations; they are micro- or mini-essays whose only dignity lies in the subjects rather than in their profundity or their size. If you find anything original here it will be unintentional, and probably regrettable. Knowledge grows, but wisdom, though it can improve with years, does not progress with centuries. I cannot instruct Solomon.

Perhaps when it is too late we shall discover that we have sold the most precious thing in our civilization — the loyal love of a man for a woman — for the sake of the desolate security that cowards find in gold. Youth, if it were wise, would cherish love beyond all things else, keeping body and soul clean for its coming, lengthening its days with months of betrothal, sanctioning it with a marriage of solemn ritual, making all things subordinate to it resolutely. Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing it with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?

As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget our radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account. After forty we prefer that the world should stand still, that the moving picture of life should freeze into a tableau. Partly the increased conservatism of middle age is the result of wisdom, which perceives the complexity of institutions and the imperfections of desire; but partly it is the result of lowered energy, and corresponds to the immaculate morality of exhausted men. We perceive, at first incredulously and then with despair, that the reservoir of strength no longer fills itself after we draw upon it.

Such a chronicle of conflict exaggerates, without doubt, the role of war in the record of our race. Strife is dramatic, and (to most of our historians) peaceful generations appear to have no history. So our chroniclers leap from battle to battle, and unwittingly deform the past into a shambles. In our saner moments we know that it is not so; that lucid intervals of peace far outweigh, in any nation’s story, the mad seizures of war; that the history of civilization — of law and morals, science and invention, religion and philosophy, letters and the arts — run like hidden gold in the river of time.

In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a slightly better state. We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves. Perhaps, if we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest thought — if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other peoples, and sensitive to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost universal sympathy. We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity. Someday, let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country without betraying mankind.

Why do we become more conservative as we age? Is it because we have found a place in the existing system, have risen to a larger income, and have invested our savings in an economy, which any significant revolt might alter to our loss? I believe this is the primary cause. But we should admit a secondary cause, which conservatives hold to be fundamental: a growing knowledge of human nature, and of the limits that human behavior puts upon the attainment of ideals. Presumably there is also a physiological cause — a lessening of vital forces as the years advance.

My own passage from devout radicalism to cautious liberalism may illustrate the transition, and may allow the reader to discount my conclusions.

One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.

Wisdom involves a profound understanding of people, objects, events, or situations, enabling the ability to apply perceptions and judgments to complex life situations.

Wise individuals are often self-aware and understand their own limitations and biases. ***

An old Chinese proverb says wisdom begins with calling things by their right name.

We must not compare nations in their youth with nations in the mellowness of their cultural maturity, and we must not compare the worst or the best of one age with the selected best or worst of all the collected past. If we find the type of genius prevalent in young countries like America and Australia tends to the executive, explorative, and scientific kind rather than to the painter of pictures or poems, the carver of statues or words, we shall understand that each age and place calls for and needs certain brands of genius rather than others, and that the cultural sort can only come when its practical predecessors have cleared the forest and prepared the way.

The young man knows all the rules; the old man knows all the exceptions.

Brains are no substitute for judgment.

What an investor need is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.