Finally, we do become wise, but then it's too late

"A man will not begin this work and will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possesses neither self-consciousness nor all that is connected with it, that is, unity or individuality, permanent "I," and will."

Knowledge ceases to be wisdom when one has no method for making sense or use of what one learns.

Whoever among you thinks himself wise must become a fool to be truly wise

The majority of people who acquire wisdom do so after they have passed the age of forty. Prior to that time the majority of people are too busy gathering knowledge and organizing it into plans to spend any effort seeking wisdom.

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

— A man for whom accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, who tests it.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.

[E]ven a great man cannot be wise in everything.

When a man’s success becomes commonplace to him, it is his success no longer.

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – so far as any of us can be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached. I know there are young people . . . whose teachers have instilled in them a nobility of mind and moral refinement from the very beginning of their schooldays. They perhaps have nothing to retract when they look back upon their lives; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.