Book Summary: “Wisdom Takes Work”

Selected Quotes & Ideas from the Book

• Wisdom is "a lagging indicator of work done long ago, the fruit nurtured from seed planted long ago."
• "The most important decision a person makes in their life is to become a student and to remain one not just in school or in their profession, but for life."
• "What we put in our brain, especially early on but also on a daily basis, forms a kind of bank balance that we will draw on in the future."
• "It is to take one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them." -Michel de Montaigne
• Montaigne carried a coin that said, "I reserve judgment."
• "Those who refuse to pick sides...make twice as many enemies."
• "Imagine that you have died. Now take what's left of your life and live it properly." -Marcus Aurelius
• "I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero." -Michel de Montaigne
• Reading
  • "Books are the best provisions a man can take with him on life's journey." -Michel de Montaigne
  • "You will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead." -Priestess at Delphi, to Zeno
  • "There are many paths to wisdom, but nearly every one of them runs through books."
  • "Never read without taking extracts." -Pliny the Elder
  • "Make sure you write down everything interesting you find." -Eric Hoffer, to James Mattis
• "Curiosity, like gravity, is accelerative. The more you know, the more you want to know." -David McCullough
• "That is the essence of science, ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer." -Jacob Bronowski
• "A student in a hurry learns the slowest." -Samurai teacher, to Banzo
• LBJ's secret for getting things done in politics: "You get close to the people at the center of things."
• "Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you." -Goethe
• "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of the lessons that history has to teach us." -Aldous Huxley
• "The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know." -Harry Truman
• "See your own country as a tourist. Live abroad like a local."
• "The outer voyage facilitates the inner journey."
• "With extreme success the air becomes thinner. Real feedback, rarer. Truth, scarcer."
• "Sometimes it seems like we're more afraid of looking or feeling stupid than being stupid—which is what we are when we refuse to ask questions, when we write off whole subjects as pointless, when we reject mentors and teachers and coaches."
• "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary; it fulfills the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things." -Winston Churchill
• "A fool is someone who stubs their toe on the same rock twice." -Roman saying
• "Wisdom is not only making mistakes and learning from them, it's also not being ashamed of having made them. In fact, we talk about our mistakes openly so we can codify the lessons not just for ourselves, but for others."
• "They say I tell a great many stories. I reckon I do, but I have learned from long experience that plain people...are more easily influenced through the medium of a proud and humorous illustration than any other way." -Abraham Lincoln
• "At no rank is a marine excused from study." -General James Mattis
• "It requires a degree of maturity to realize that all solutions are partial ones." -Admiral Hyman Rickover
• "Remember what it was to be me, that is always the point." -Joan Didion, about her journaling
• "The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood." -Voltaire
• "The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company." -Seneca
• "The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others." -Eleanor Roosevelt
• "A writer—and I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to use for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." -Jorge Luis Borges
• "Ego doesn't learn. That's not what it does. It protects the self from having to learn."
• "Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish." -Abraham Lincoln, re: the Civil War
• "Ignorance is a solvable problem...but it requires admitting the problem first. You can't learn what you think you know."
• "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Ralph Waldo Emerson