Now, I said, you are on more substantial and almost unanswerable ground; for if the injustice which you were maintaining to be profitable had been admitted by you as by others to be vice and deformity, an answer might have been given to you on received principles; but now I perceive that you will call injustice honourable and strong, and to the unjust you will attribute all the qualities which were attributed by us before to the just, seeing that you do not hesitate to rank injustice with wisdom and virtue.
As we were now agreed that justice was virtue and wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance, I proceeded to another point:
Then the other pretended to give way, and said, 'Thou must let the sack of wisdom descend, by untying yonder cord, and then thou shalt enter.' So the student let him down, opened the sack, and set him free.
So saying, he trotted off on the student's nag, and left the poor fellow to gather wisdom till somebody should come and let him down.
Men of Athens, this reputation of mine has come of a certain sort of
wisdom which I possess.
Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the
wisdom of the prince, and not the
wisdom of the prince from good counsels.
True
wisdom then, notwithstanding all which Mr Hogarth's poor poet may have writ against riches, and in spite of all which any rich well-fed divine may have preached against pleasure, consists not in the contempt of either of these.
SOCRATES: If then virtue is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be profitable, it must be
wisdom or prudence, since none of the things of the soul are either profitable or hurtful in themselves, but they are all made profitable or hurtful by the addition of
wisdom or of folly; and therefore if virtue is profitable, virtue must be a sort of
wisdom or prudence?
Oftenest I have unwisely uttered my
wisdom in the ears of sick persons, when the inquietude of fever made them toss about upon my cushion.
"The highest
wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided.
As to Henry C-, the next in age and
wisdom of our band, he had broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of his family, solidly rooted, if I remember rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb.
HAEMON O father, I am thine, and I will take Thy
wisdom as the helm to steer withal.