top of page
Exlpore more Wisdom quotes

"True wisdom often comes from the experience of failure-not from success."

"It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course."

"Because of ignorance and negligence we lost the most precious value-life."

"To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything."

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

"Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."

"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."

"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."

"To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man."

"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
bottom of page