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In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism.

— T. S. Eliot What Is a Classic? (1944)

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Wisdom

More quotes by T. S. Eliot

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land (1922)

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If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: T. S. Eliot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.