This is not wisdom yet, this is sleeping wisdom. To wake up, it needs you.
Perhaps, the greatest sages, like Confucius, Zarathustra, The Buddha, the Prophets of the Bible, Socrates, the Christ, or even Homer and Aesop never wrote, because they knew the danger of wise thoughts being frozen on tablets.
The trouble with sleeping wisdom, cast in writing to be preserved, is that it needs to be resurrected from its slumber in changed times and circumstances. To come alive and serve you the words will have to be understood, anew; by you, in person, from your point of view and for your time. Understanding is live. Being contextual and tailor-made in nature, the wise words may be alien to some dissimilar world where they come back to life. A little wisdom stirred can be a dangerous thing. Wisdom helps only when fine-tuned with esprit de finesse and applied with prudent common sense. That is, wisdom can only be used wisely. It usually tells you what and what not, what is good, right, beautiful, what is preferable and maybe why, but it doesn’t tell you in what measure, when, and where, and with whom.
Judging right in a context is a matter of having your own head, good masters and many flying hours of learning from your own life experience. Yet again the rich – the intelligent and educated - will become richer and the poor in spirit will stay as dumb as they were found. You should not believe what you read here but rather examine it with critical sense. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write.
These “wise words” are worldly wisdom, not divine: things I observed, or read, or heard, or thought up and worded myself. I collect, on the following pages, examples of what I found to be wise knowledge, things I believe within my own limits of understanding. This is what appeared to me to be wise. Some of it proved in my experience to be wise as it improved my life and my person.
I believe now that wise words offer advice to questions like: What is important to know and to understand in order to live well in this world? What to want? What is of value and worth? What to avoid? How to go about things, to get what we want and to avoid what we do not want? How to live? How to be authors and free actors of our life instead of mere toys of circumstances?
I will never be able to claim that this selection is complete or wise enough to all other people; of course I may be wrong here and there. It is not science and I take my sides. This wisdom seems verified in my circumstances. The value is certain, if not in my conclusions, at least in provoking one’s thoughts about these matters. The odyssey is more important than the destination I reached. Do your own journey!
Ioan Tenner
Ioan Tenner
This is another quiet place of exchange on Internet where all serious people are invited to contribute with critique (always welcome) and with opinions. We do not own the one right answer.
With this page I also try something rare. I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, to read the posts and comment. His role is clear: to challenge me, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims: “Wait a minute! Why do you say this? I find that reality is different. This is how I see things.”
With this page I also try something rare. I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, to read the posts and comment. His role is clear: to challenge me, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims: “Wait a minute! Why do you say this? I find that reality is different. This is how I see things.”
We would like together to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Cather: “The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
These then, the following, are some thoughts about wisdom and some words of wisdom I found to be deep and true in my life, in the times and the world where I lived:
