Top wisdom

Editor’s picks

A few words worth spending time with, selected by Wisegram. Community favourites appear here as readers discover and like them.

• The brain that sows not corn, plants thistles.Proverb collected by Thomas Preston
• Fall down seven times, rise up eight.Japanese proverb (nanakorobi yaoki)
• The best is the enemy of the good.Voltaire
• Ask thy purse what thou shouldst buy.Proverb collected by Thomas Preston
• The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.Michel de Montaigne
• I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.Baruch Spinoza
• No great thing comes into being suddenly, any more than a cluster of grapes or a fig. There must be time: let it flower first, then bear fruit, then ripen.Epictetus
• What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?George Eliot