These unwise quotes will inspire you. Unwise (of a person or action) not wise or sensible; foolish.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unwise quotes, unwise sayings, and unwise proverbs.
Best Unwise Quotes
- “What is necessary is never unwise.” ~ Ben Cross
- “I really believe my greatest service is in the many unwise steps I prevent.” ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King
- “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.” ~ Neil Gaiman
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“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.” ~ James Russell Lowell
- “When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.” ~ John Ruskin
- “Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.” ~ James Russell Lowell
- “So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss
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“But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. This is rare and pure and perfect.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss
- “It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.” ~ John Ruskin
- “So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.” ~ Walter Bagehot
- “Look at those they call unfortunate and at a closer view, you’ll find many of them are unwise.” ~ Andrew Young
- “It is most unwise for people in love to marry.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
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“The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.” ~ Walter Savage Landor
- “Understand that it is often unwise to forgive face to face. This tends to make the other person feel ‘put down’ and make you look holier-than-thou.” ~ Charles Stanley
- “We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.” ~ Thomas Paine
- “The wiser course is to think of others when pursuing our own happiness.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “This is servitude, To serve the unwise.” ~ John Milton
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“When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.” ~ Jim Holt
- “God doesn’t want us to be happy when it causes us to do something wrong or unwise” ~ Craig Groeschel
- “People will always be around to tell you you’re no good or you’re wrong or unwise to keep doing what you want to do. They’re wrong. They’re always wrong. Keep going.” ~ Elaine Stritch
- “I suppose true sexual equality will come when a general called Anthea is found having an unwise lunch with a young, unreliable model from Spain.” ~ John Mortimer
- “Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.” ~ Karen Armstrong
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“A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.” ~ Andre Gide
- “Partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path, and we need only look at France and Germany to see how unwise it is to create a permanent underclass.” ~ Zoe Lofgren
- “Alice thought, No. It wasn’t the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn’t the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild…It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.” ~ Toni Morrison
- “Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.” ~ Alice Walker
- “Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch–as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“He picked some unwise words. Saying, “I’ll enjoy killing you for my lord”, is just not the way to make my acquaintance.” ~ Charlaine Harris
- “Breathe in, breath out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be unwise though, to try to extend life by not breathing at all. Which of us doesn’t do it? Either we loll in anaerobic stupor, too afraid to fill our lungs with risky beauty, or we roll out fire like dragons, destroying the world we love. I try not to burn up my world with rage. It is so hard.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.” ~ Lee Child
- “I cross my arms. “It was a two minute conversation.” “I don’t think a smaller time frame makes it less unwise.” He furrows his eyebrows and touches the corner of my bruised eye with his fingertips. My head jerks back, but he doesn’t take his hand away. Instead he sighs. “You know, if you could just learn to attack first, you might do better.” “Attack first?” I say. “How will that help?” “You’re fast. If you can get a few good hits in before they know what’s going on, you could win.” He shrugs, and his hand falls.” ~ Veronica Roth
- “The whole world is starting to realize that it was the most unwise thing for our society to have ignored women power, to run the society with male priorities.” ~ Yoko Ono
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“To make decisions while infuriated is as unwise and foolish as it is for a captain to put out to sea in a raging storm.” ~ ElRay L. Christiansen
- “A democrat need not believe that the majority will always reach a wise decision. He should however believe in the necessity of accepting the decision of the majority, be it wise or unwise, until such a time that the majority reaches another decision.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “The truth is that we don’t know much about the spiritual world except for what Scripture tells us, so it’s unwise to think we can speak with clarity about what a divine being can or cannot do. The tools of analyzing the natural world are of no use for analyzing the supernatural world. For the latter we need rules of logic, and the supernatural beliefs of the biblical writers are quite defensible in that arena.” ~ Michael S. Heiser
- “In the business world, unwise men take more that they give. They do not realize that they are breaking the Universal Law which will eventually break them to an equal extent. It may not be balanced in the form of dollars and cents but in the loss of good-will upon which their future business depends.” ~ Walter Russell
- “Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.” ~ George Washington
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“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.” ~ John Ruskin
- “Millions of mutual-fund investors sleep well at night, serene in the belief that superior outcomes result from pooling funds with like-minded investors and engaging high-quality investment managers to provide professional insight. The conventional wisdom ends up hopelessly unwise, as evidence shows an overwhelming rate of failure by mutual funds to deliver on promises.” ~ David F. Swensen
- “To relinquish a present good through apprehension of a future evil is in most instances unwise … from a fear which may afterwards turn out groundless, you lost the good that lay within your grasp.” ~ Francesco Guicciardini
- “I don’t care if you’re a parent giving to a child, a worker to a company, or a romantic to a lover, this behavior eventually leads to resentment. There’s always a hidden agenda of What’s in it for me? It’s often suppressed, and this is why sacrifice is ultimately unwise and incomplete. Does this mean that there’s no such thing as altruism, philanthropy, or generosity? No, it just means that anytime these exist, so do egocentricity, misanthropy, and greed. There’s always a balancing force, even if it’s sometimes hidden or unconscious.” ~ John Frederick Demartini
- “I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.” ~ W. E. B. Du Bois
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“To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.” ~ George Eliot
- “It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason–that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem’s coherence is achieved.” ~ Cecil Day-Lewis
- “It is cowardly to fly from natural duties and take up those that suit our taste or temperament better; but it is also unwise to take an exaggerated view of personal duties, which shuts out the proper care of the mind and body entrusted to us.” ~ Ellen Swallow Richards
- “It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “the principal sources of human misery may fairly be said to lie in the over-possession, under-possession, and the unwise use of economic goods.” ~ Georgia Harkness
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“I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “To everything there is a bright side and a dark side; and I hold it to be unwise, unphilosophic, unkind to others, and unhealthy for one’s own soul, to form the habit of looking on the dark side. Cheerfulness is to the spiritual atmosphere what sunshine is to the earthly landscape. I am resolved to cherish cheerfulness with might and main.” ~ Lydia M. Child
- “It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” ~ Anthony Bourdain
- “But I do think its unwise, and it – to build a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as a result of a terrorist attack. And I think to me it demonstrates that the – that Washington, the White House, the administration, the President himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America.” ~ John Cornyn
- “It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato’s point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.” ~ Bertrand Russell
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“That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “… so far from entrenching human conduct within the gentle barriers of peace and love, religion has ever been, and now is, the deepest source of contentions, wars, persecutions for conscience sake, angry words, angry feelings, backbitings, slanders, suspicions, false judgments, evil interpretations, unwise, unjust, injurious, inconsistent actions.” ~ Frances Wright
- “There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- “The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don’t know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “‘God himself cannot exist without wise men’ – Luther said, and was right. But ‘God can exist even less without unwise men’ – that good old Luther did not say.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.” ~ Agnes Repplier
- “51% of the French people – who are not very religious – were thinking that what “Charlie Hebdo” did was unwise. They aren’t asking for a law to prevent Charlie Hebdo from publishing caricatures, but they are calling on its editors to be a bit more sensible.” ~ Tariq Ramadan
- “My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn’t contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.” ~ Marianne Williamson
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“I think we have people that are not even leaving their comfort zone to engage people with the gospel. I don’t know if you can be overzealous, but you can be unwise in the way you do it.” ~ Greg Laurie
- “I think there are a good many Donald Trump voters who are sick of government as it is practiced in America and genuinely want to blow up the system and see what happens. They are stupid – or at least unwise – but not necessarily racist.” ~ Gene Weingarten
- “When we generally make healthy choices about food (or wise choices about life), we tend to move in the right direction, living as we believe God wants us to live. If we make an intentional exception for a special treat or for a diversion, that might not be a big deal. But if we step off the best path, we’re tempted to detour into more unwise choices. In that case, your decision does matter.” ~ Craig Groeschel
