Famous aphorisms in English

Wisdom and Ignorance

 

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"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Lewis Carroll

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
Lewis Carroll

'Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Samuel Johnson

'Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.
Alexander Pope

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
Robert Burton

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
G. C. Lichtenberg

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.
Mark Twain

A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.
Wilson Mizner

A fool must now and then be right by chance.
William Cowper

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
Wilson Mizner

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James

A great teacher never strives to explain his vision. He simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.
R. Inman

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
Unknown

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
Frank Capra

A large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way.
Donald O. Hebb

A library is an arsenal of liberty.
Unknown

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
Bob Edwards

A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.
Unknown

A man lives by believing in something, not by debating and arguing about many things.
Thomas Carlyle

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.
Confucius

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
Unknown

A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
Unknown

A pseudo-intellectual is a person who knows what "pseudo" means.
Unknown

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
Lao Tzu

A single fact can spoil a good argument.
Unknown

A small journey begins with one step and ends with another.
Unknown

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
Burt Bacharach

A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire

Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
Bruce Lee

Advice is like kissing. It costs nothing and is a pleasant thing to do.
H. W. Shaw

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.
The Earl of Chesterfield

All generalizations are false, including this one.
Blaise Pascal

All men naturally desire knowledge.
Aristotle

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
Buddha

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
George Santiano

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
James Michener

An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means.
Winston Churchill

An expert is someone who is one page ahead of you in the manual.
David Knight

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain -- and most fools do.
Dale Carnegie

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacher

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Henry Louis Mencken

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
Robert J. Oppenheimer

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
Publilius Syrus

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Voltaire

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
Colin Powell

Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.
Iara Gassen

Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of Truth.
Johann Georg von Zimmermann

Become a student of change. It is the only thing that will remain constant.
Anthony J. D'Angelo

Before God we are all equally wise -- and equally foolish.
Albert Einstein

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish in the crowd.
Unknown

Beware the man of one book.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Ambrose Bierce

Bravery and stupidity go hand in hand.
David Summers

Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
Unknown

Clear writers assume, with a pessimism born of experience, that whatever isn't plainly stated the reader will invariably misconstrue.
John R. Trimble

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
Ambrose Bierce

College isn't the place to go for ideas.
Helen Keller

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
George Bernard Shaw

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says: "I'll try again tomorrow."
Anne Hunninghake

Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
George Bernard Shaw

Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J. D'Angelo

Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson

Do two wrongs make a right? Yes. The right to be wrong.
David Epstein

Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle?
Ed Cotter

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Unknown

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
Will Durant

Education is civil defense against media fallout.
Marshall McLuhan

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.
Martin H. Fischer

Education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
Anatole France

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Henry Peter Brougham

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm S. Forbes

Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the fool their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson

Even thinking is participation.
Lassi Kämäri

Ever notice that "what the hell" is always the right decision?
Marilyn Monroe

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varese

Everything we really need to know we learned in kindergarten.
Robert Fulghum

Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso

Experience is not what happens to you. It's what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley

Experience is often what you get when you were expecting something else.
Unknown

Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
H. H. Williams

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Unknown

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
La Rochefoucauld

Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgement.
Rita Mae Brown

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
Gail Godwin

Growing old is not growing up.
Doug Horton

Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.
E. B. White

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
William Shakespeare

He who learns and runs away, lives to learn another day.
Edward Lee Thorndike

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo

He who spends his time reading aphorisms of another to have one of his own, has no time or brains to have any of his own.
M. Bernheisel

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
M. C. Escher

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W. C. Fields

However hot the water is, the fire still goes out.
Unknown

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells

I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.
A. A. Milne

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors... Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote but has the decency of not publishing.
Jorge Luis Borges

I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde

I am only serious about 20% of the time; one of the great joys of my life is the fact that I alone know when that is.
Mark Richards

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
Jane Austen

I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I hate quotations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
Harry S Truman

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Confucius

I improve on misquotation.
Cary Grant

I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Anatole France

I use not only all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
Woodrow Wilson

I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
Unknown

I was asked by the customs if I had anything to declare. I said: Yes, I'd like to declare -- I'm a genius!
Oscar Wilde

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, "I don't know."
Mark Twain

I will tell you the truth as soon as I figure it out.
Wayne Birmingham

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
Diane Sawyer

I'm more like I am now than I ever was before.
Greg

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin

If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.
Tom Lehrer

If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?
Unknown

If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.
Larry Leissner

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.
R. D. Laing

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?
Unknown

If someone had told me I would be pope one day, I would have studied harder.
Pope John Paul I

If the aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Garn

If we are the only intelligent life in the universe, at least there's a finite number of idiots.
Steven Coallier

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
Anaïs Nin

If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read.
Unknown

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
Unknown

If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
Unknown

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra

If you do what you've always done, you'll be what you've always been.
Unknown

If you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything.
Unknown

If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
Unknown

If you hear a wise sentence or an apt phrase, commit it to your memory.
Sir Henry Sidney

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you -- but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
Unknown

If you never change your mind, why have one?
Edward De Bono

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Andy McIntyre

If you're here, you're alive.
Unknown

If, while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field's employment is glutted.
Marguerite Emmons

Ignorance does not necesarilly mean one has a lack of wisdom, for a most ignorant person can be one with much wisdom. It's "live and learn" that creates wisdom.
Austin Holmes

Ignorance is the mother of devotion.
Robert Burton

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Jules de Gaultier

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
Akiro Kurosawa

In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most.
Epicurus

In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything.
Ashleigh Brilliant

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
Mark Twain

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
John Lilly

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Samuel Johnson

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
Theodor W. Adorno

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