Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why. If you do not have things right in your life you will be overwhelmed: you may be heroic, but you will not be wise. If you have things right in your life but do not know why, you are just lucky, and you will not move in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.

Wisdom and knowledge can best be understood together. Knowledge is learning, the power of the mind to understand and describe the universe. Wisdom is knowing how to apply knowledge and how not to apply it. Knowledge is knowing what to say; wisdom is knowing whether or not to say it. Knowledge gives answers; wisdom asks questions. Knowledge can be taught, wisdom grows from experience.

We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

wisdom involves using our powerful intellect to recognize the consequences of our actions and to think of the well-being of the whole.

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.

Wisdom is knowing you know nothing

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. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

For what, in the name of heaven, is more to be desired than wisdom? What is more to be prized? What is better for a man, what more worthy of his nature? Those who seek after it are called philosophers; and philosophy is nothing else, if one will translate the word into our idiom, than ‘the love of wisdom.’ Wisdom … is ‘the knowledge of things human and divine and of the causes by which those things are controlled.’ And if the man lives who would belittle the study of philosophy, I quite fail to see what in the world he would see fit to praise.

Wisdom equals knowledge plus courage. You have to not only know what to do and when to do it, but you have to also be brave enough to follow through.

Knowledge is merely brilliance in organization of ideas and not wisdom. The truly wise person goes beyond knowledge.