Famous Quotes About Wisdom

From letter 12, in which the demon Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood on temptation strategy. Lewis's satirical conceit — letting the enemy speak — exposed the mechanics of moral decline with a directness that a straightforward sermon might not achieve. The "gentle slope" became one of his most enduring warnings about the complacency of incremental compromise.

This is Tolstoy''s explicit critique of Napoleonic greatness — the kind of "greatness" built on complexity, strategy, and the manipulation of others. Against this, the novel consistently celebrates characters like Kutuzov and Natasha who embody simplicity (transparency), goodness (moral directness), and truth (alignment between inner conviction and outer action). The three qualities are not separate virtues but aspects of the same integrated character.

From Achebe's third novel set in Igbo-land under British colonial administration, this proverb is spoken to argue against rigid, single-perspective thinking. Achebe consistently used Igbo oral tradition — proverbs, riddles, ceremonies — to demonstrate that African epistemology was sophisticated and pluralistic long before Western contact.

One of the most-quoted lines from Achebe's debut, this proverb is used by village elders in the novel to explain why wisdom requires rich language and metaphor rather than bare statement. "Palm oil" was the most valuable commodity in Igbo trade — using it to season words signals that language, like food, must be prepared properly to nourish. The line is also Achebe's artistic credo: form and content are inseparable.

"God is Change" is the central tenet of Earthseed — Butler''s fictional religion — which grounds this assertion. The capital C in "Change" signals that Butler is treating it as the fundamental reality rather than one feature among others. This is influenced by her reading of thermodynamics and evolutionary biology: from her perspective, the only reliable thing about existence is its flux. Working with change rather than against it is, in Earthseed, the definition of wisdom.

Allende has spoken repeatedly about how her decades of living — through exile, loss, two marriages, a daughter's death, global travel — have made her more aware of complexity rather than less. Certainty, she suggests, is a luxury of the young who have not yet experienced how many exceptions every rule encounters. It is an embrace of epistemic humility as a mark of a fully lived life.