Wisdom & self-knowledge quotes, explained

Gandhi did write that changing ourselves changes how the world treats us. The neat one-line slogan is a modern paraphrase that does not appear anywhere in his writings.

A saying from the recovery movement of the early 1980s. There is no trace of it in Einstein's papers, letters or interviews.

Great things grow from small beginnings, so start with what is right in front of you. The original says the journey begins “beneath one's feet.”

Shallow knowledge makes people overconfident; only deep study makes them humble and wise. Pope's advice is to learn deeply or not at all.

A teacher's influence passes from student to student and generation to generation, so no one can say where it ends.

The melancholy Jaques compares life to a play in seven acts, from baby to old age. It is a witty, gloomy view of life that the play quietly answers.

Latin for “love of fate.” Nietzsche used it for the attitude of wanting your life exactly as it is, hard parts included, instead of merely putting up with it.

A line that sums up Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, but it has not been found in anything he wrote or said. Martin Luther King Jr. used a close version in 1958, and the 1982 film Gandhi made it famous.

Franklin's advice to Philadelphians on preventing house fires. It is now used about health, but it began as fire safety and led to the city's first volunteer fire company.

A skill takes so long to master that one lifetime is barely enough. It is a call to start now and to respect how much there is to learn.

A witty push to be authentic. It is not found anywhere in Wilde's works; the earliest known exact match is anonymous and from 1999, a century after his death.

Whether something is beautiful depends on the person looking at it. There is no single standard everyone shares.

Small, regular spending adds up. A habit that seems too minor to matter can drain your money as surely as a big mistake.

Polonius declares that being brief is the essence of intelligence, in the middle of one of the longest-winded speeches in the play. “Wit” meant good sense, not just humor.

Latin for “seize the day,” or more literally “pluck the day” like ripe fruit. Horace tells a friend to enjoy today instead of worrying about a future no one can know.

Being too nosy can get you into trouble. It is usually said as a light warning to someone asking too many questions.

Churchill did say this in Parliament in 1947, but in longer words and with a twist most people miss. He introduced it as something “that has been said,” not as his own invention.

When you get rid of what is bad, be careful not to lose what is good along with it.

The catchphrase of Sherlock Holmes, which he never says in the original stories. Holmes does say “Elementary” and “my dear Watson,” but never together.

Einstein rejected the idea that quantum mechanics is fundamentally random. “God” was his way of talking about the laws of nature, not a personal God.

In Frost's poem, a farmer's neighbor repeats an old saying while they rebuild the stone wall between them. The speaker doubts it. The poem asks the question instead of answering it.

Cicero says that being grateful is the most important virtue and the source of the others, because people who remember what they owe are loyal, dutiful and kind.

Emerson means we become strong by harnessing forces greater than ourselves, like wind, water and great ideas, and letting them carry our work. Aim your effort in the direction those higher powers already move.

The popular summary of Socrates' wisdom: he was wiser than others only because he knew the limits of his knowledge. The exact phrase is a later compression of what Plato wrote.

Descartes doubted everything he could, and found one thing he could not doubt: that he was doubting, and therefore thinking, and therefore existed.

Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.

Newton credits earlier scientists for making his discoveries possible. He borrowed the image of dwarfs on giants' shoulders from medieval scholars.

Einstein says knowledge is limited to what we already understand, while imagination reaches beyond it. He was describing how he made discoveries.

A wry aside in a letter about the new U.S. Constitution. Franklin made it famous, but the joke was already in print more than seventy years earlier.

A joke turned into a proverb: even a father may not truly know his child. Shakespeare reverses the older saying that it is a wise child who knows its own father.

Latin for “remember that you must die.” It is a reminder that life is short, meant to make you humble and to push you to spend your days on what matters.

Latin for “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Juvenal says that if you must pray for something, pray for these, not for wealth, power or a long life.

A shortened form of 1 Timothy 6:10, which warns against the love of money, not money itself. Dropping “the love of” changes the meaning.

Don't borrow money and don't lend it, because a loan can cost you both the money and the friend, and borrowing makes you careless with what you have.

Everything flows and changes, so the river is never the same twice, and neither are you. The popular wording is a later paraphrase of Heraclitus's surviving fragments.

An empowering line credited to Eleanor Roosevelt during her lifetime. It has never been found in her columns, books or speeches, so its true origin is unknown.

Acton's argument that historians should not excuse popes and kings because of their office. He wrote “tends to” corrupt, a qualification usually dropped.

Arrogance leads to ruin. The popular saying shortens a two-part verse from the Book of Proverbs, which pairs pride with destruction and a haughty spirit with a fall.

A rough, practical guide based on experience rather than exact measurement or theory.

A prayer to understand how short life is, so that we spend our days wisely.

Roosevelt's rule for power: stay calm and polite, but have real strength ready. He called it a West African proverb, though no such proverb has been found.

Keep wanting more and keep being willing to look foolish by trying new things. Jobs borrowed the words from the farewell issue of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Burns, having wrecked a mouse's nest with his plough, tells her that the best plans of mice and men often go wrong, and that he is worse off than her because he worries about the past and the future.

Thoreau argues that most people work themselves to exhaustion for things they don't need, and hide their despair behind ordinary routines. Walden is his experiment in living otherwise.

Education should not just pour facts into students but light their own desire to think and to find the truth.

The fastest runner doesn't always win and the strongest army doesn't always conquer. Luck and timing affect everyone, so talent alone is no guarantee.

At his trial, Socrates refuses to stop questioning people about how to live, saying a life without such questioning is not worth living for a human being. He chose death over silence.

Polonius's parting advice to his son Laertes: be honest with yourself, and you will be honest with others. It is good advice from a character who rarely follows it.

Part of Santayana's argument that progress depends on memory. He was writing about how individuals and societies learn, not giving a warning specifically about politics or war.

Written by Franklin for the Pennsylvania Assembly in a tax dispute with the colony's proprietors. It was a defense of the elected assembly's power to tax, not an argument against security measures.

Hamlet asks whether it is better to live and endure life's suffering or to die and end it, and concludes that fear of what comes after death keeps people going.

Everyone makes mistakes; forgiving them is what lifts us toward the divine. Pope wrote it to urge critics to be generous to struggling writers.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.

A modern summary of Aristotle's ethics by the American historian Will Durant. The idea is Aristotle's; the sentence is Durant's.

A line about inner character mattering more than past or future. It was written in 1940 by Henry Stanley Haskins, not by Emerson, who died in 1882.

A teenager thinks his father knows nothing. A few years later, grown up, he realizes his father was wise all along. The joke is that it was the son who changed.

Steady, useful work protects us from three things that ruin lives: having nothing to do, falling into bad habits, and being poor.

The present day is never ordinary. Emerson warns against the illusion that the important moment is always somewhere else, and says today is the critical, decisive day.