The Sage archetype is often depicted as a wise old man, and can be a profound philosopher distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.
100 Quotes for Sages
We’ve collected the best quotes about sages for you to read through.
This selection of quotations are based solely on my personal taste and are in no particular order. You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favourite quotes.
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Checkout this list of sage quotes:
1. Jennifer A Nielsen
A person can be educated and still be stupid, and a wise man can have no education at all.
2. Allan Rufus
Life is like a game of chess.
To win you have to make a move.
Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT
and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are
acculated along the way.
We become each and every piece within the game called life!
3. Jennifer A Nielsen
Everyone gets scared at times. It’s only the fools who won’t admit it
4. Jennifer A Nielsen
I never denied being a fool. That’s the difference between us.
5. Toba Beta
Ask a sage, he will explain.
Ask a fool, he will complain.
6. Hilary Duff
Pleased to meet you.” Sage said, offering his hand. “The pleasure is all mine,” Rayna Purred. “Unless ofcourse, it’s all Clea’s which is even better.”
Sage smiled and might have even blushed a bit, which was highly entertaining.
7. Ogwo David Emenike
The Sage’s Wish: Like Sun, from the East, may you continue to rise, smile and shine.
8. Julie Kagawa
What was with this family, that all the sons were so freaking handsome it hurt to look at them
9. Criss Jami
A wise man’s goal shouldn’t be to say something profound, but to say something useful.
10. Vera Nazarian
A sage is a former fool who has become tired of himself.
A foolish sage is one who forgets this.
Remember, or come full circle.
11. Toba Beta
Sage sees presage.
12. Justin Alcala
Wisdom is often cliché and pain is generally witty. Never fault an insightful man for their thoughts or mistaken a clever man as a sage.
13. Emil M Cioran
Educating yourself not to leave traces is a moment-by-momcnt war against yourself, solely to prove that you could, if you chose, become a sage….
14. Abhijit Naskar
Most people can perceive the obvious outside appearance of things, but to go deeper, piercing the surface of appearance, is the real skill of a sage.
15. Eknath Easwaran
As rivers flow into the ocean but cannot make the vast ocean overflow, so flow the streams of the sense-world into the sea of peace that is the sage
16. Abhijit Naskar
Defying evidence and blabbering mystical mumbo-jumbo don’t make a person a sage or a monk, what does is a person’s practical understanding of the world we live in, accompanied by a burning urge to bring that understanding into practice to lift humanity from the darkest pit of degradation.
17. Soroosh Shahrivar
The saint and sage diss’n’cuss and argue over us.
I swallow my pain, with this loaf of bread when I hear them fuss.
While they bicker and argue over their mental crossroad.
The truth is, life moves forward. Not in a circle
18. Munia Khan
If you try to be a sage, let your modesty subside your rage
19. Anthony Ryan
Nobility is a lie. A pretence that high standing comes from anything more than money or martial prowess. Any dolt can play the noble, and as you’ll discover in time, daughter, it’s mostly dolts who do
20. Abhijit Naskar
Smartness without wisdom is stupidity.
21. Anonymous
As a solid mass of rock
Is not moved by the wind,
So a sage is unmoved
By praise or blame.
22. Abhijit Naskar
Wisdom evolves, but one core principle in it does not. It is the principle of becoming better, by demolishing the shortcomings of today and building the benefits of tomorrow.
23. Lao Tzu
The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
24. Lao Tzu
The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.
25. Baltasar Gracian
He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.
26. Publilius Syrus
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
27. Xun Kuang
In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men’s nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.
28. Xun Kuang
Human nature and deliberate effort must unite, and then the reputation of the sage and the work of unifying all under Heaven are thereupon brought to completion.
29. Mason Cooley
The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.
30. Sun Yat-sen
Decades of futile effort have not dampened my bold aspirations to save the nation. Born in a late age, I have not been able to witness the golden rule of Yao and Shun and other sage emperors of ancient China. Instead, my heart grieves at the suffering of the Chinese people under the cruel exploitation of the Tartar Slaves.
31. Utah Philips
When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.
32. Sarah Lacy
The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.
33. Jude Law
I don’t consider myself any great sage of fashion or style, whatever people may want to think.
34. J.M. Coetzee
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
35. J.M. Coetzee
In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
36. Maximillian Degenerez
Ripen your mind to the glorious history of the ages and revel in your mastery as today’s youth shall look upon you as a sage.
37. Jason Mraz
I guess my music career is my personal life. You know, I’ve always been a writer who wants to write about my experiences. And so this experience being added to that, I – I want to live extraordinary experiences. And when I give advice to people, I want it to be sage advice.
38. Dhani Harrison
‘Keep your head down at school.’ Those are sage words from my dad. They kept me in check for years.
39. Sinclair Lewis
Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
40. Dianne Reeves
I knew what the story behind ‘Dreams’ was. It was about Stevie Knicks’ relationship. But when I sing it, it’s about sharing some sage advice with somebody.
41. Suharto
I have the view that if I am no longer a president, I am determined to become a sage in the sense that I will get closer to God, take care of the children so they can become good citizens, advise people, and guide the government from behind by using whatever I have to assist the country.
42. Tom Rath
It’s unrealistic to expect the person you go to for sage advice also to be the person you go out and have a good time with. And it’s unlikely that he or she will be the same person who’s pushing you and motivating you to do more every day, like a coach or manager does.
43. Christopher Buckley
I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
44. James Wolcott
A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
45. Martin Filler
The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience.
46. Paul Di Filippo
One posthumous measure of a person’s life is how often you imagine his impossible return to deal with some event he never lived to encounter. You picture his reactions, his advice, his sage commentary and humorous asides. For instance, I think about Mark Twain’s hypothetical take on current events several times a week.
47. Margo Georgiadis
Cultivating a strong group of personal directors takes time and commitment. For me, it took more than 10 years to find a diverse group that could give me sage advice when I needed it most.
48. James Beattie
He thought as a sage, though he felt like a man.
49. Michael Sims
Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne’er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties.
50. G.C. Lichtenberg
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
51. Thomas Hobbes
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.
52. Marcel Proust
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
53. Cicero
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
54. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
55. Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one mind common to all individual men.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. All the facts of history pre-exist as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the manifold world.
56. Zhuangzi
The sage is still not because he takes stillness to be good and therefore is still. The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind – that is the reason he is still.
57. Thiruvalluvar
Even more than the time when she gave birth, a mother feels her greatest joy when she hears others refer to her son as a wise learned one.
58. Michael Bassey Johnson
Prove to the world that you are alive, let your words breathe life into the nostrils of the universe.
59. Matthieu Ricard
One is not born wise; one becomes it.
60. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Intelligence is a way of thinking, not a choice of words
61. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most unintelligent or foolish people do not regard themselves as that; they regard themselves as not-that-intelligent or not-that-wise
62. Zhuangzi
A man like this will not go where he has no will to go, will not do what he has no mind to do. Though the world might praise him and say he had really found something, he would look unconcerned and never turn his head; though the world might condemn him and say he had lost something, he would look serene and pay no heed. The praise and blame of the world are no loss or gain to him
63. Abhijit Naskar
By nature, that mind is easily fooled by supernatural mysticism. It is extremely gullible. And no matter how much we the civilized human beings advance in the fields of modern sciences, there is always a part of us, that tries to allure us with magical nonsense, because that nonsense has been with us since the birth of humanity.
64. Abhijit Naskar
The human mind has a primordial affinity towards ideas of miracles and mysticism, especially, in times of weakness.
65. Abhijit Naskar
A sage sees no conflict between Science & Religion.
66. Debasish Mridha
A great sage is like a tree, he lives just to help others, just to make this world beautiful.
67. Debasish Mridha
A true sage is simple like a child.
68. Michael Bassey Johnson
The most holy cannibalism you can perform is to eat the flesh and blood of sagacity, and by sharing it with other wisdom thirsty cannibals.
69. Allan Rufus
Unless we take that first step into the unknown, we will never know our own potential!
70. Ogwo David Emenike
What would have been the fate of sages if there were no fools?
71. Michael Bassey Johnson
Wisdom is not counted in grammers, niether in fluency, but vividly shown in mannerism.
72. Michael Bassey Johnson
There’s no difference between a madman and a professor…it should be clear to you in the way they dress, act and think.
73. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?
74. R.G. Collingwood
History is for human self-knowledge … the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is
75. Aristotle
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it
76. Aristotle
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom
77. Napoleon Bonaparte
It is only with prudence, sagacity, and much dexterity that great aims are accomplished, and all obstacles surmounted. Otherwise nothing is accomplished.
78. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
79. Friedrich Nietzsche
War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
80. Joseph Addison
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.
81. Lord Chesterfield
Mind not only what people say, but how they say it; and if you have any sagacity, you may discover more truth by your eyes than by your ears. People can say what they will, but they cannot look just as they will; and their looks frequently (reveal) what their words are calculated to conceal.
82. Dagobert D Runes
Happy the man who gains sagacity in youth, but thrice happy he who retains the fervour of youth in age.
83. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity – a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.
84. Thorstein Veblen
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.
85. Leo Rosten
Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
86. James Thurber
The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
87. Frank William Taussig
The successful businessman must be able to foresee possibilities, to estimate with sagacity the outcome in the future.
88. Bertrand Russell
Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
89. Friedrich Nietzsche
“Ego,” sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing – in which thou art unwilling to believe – is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not “ego,” but doeth it.
90. Theodore Roosevelt
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.
91. George Santanaya
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
92. Woodrow Wilson
His [the President’s] office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.
93. Mark Twain
When in doubt, tell the truth. That maxim I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me. I did say, “When you are in doubt,” but when I am in doubt myself I use more sagacity.
94. William Mathews
So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man’s mouth, and a wooden one into another’s, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star.
95. Samuel Johnson
Criticism, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, has not yet attained the certainty and stability of science.
96. Walter Bagehot
The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.
97. Alexander Hamilton
The idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government) has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.
98. Denis Diderot
I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.
99. Woodrow Wilson
Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.
100. Adrian Bejan
Serendipity is the way to make discoveries, by accident but also by sagacity, of things one is not in quest of. Based on experience, knowledge, it is the creative exploitation of the unforeseen.
