1. “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”

Gloria Steinem (1934–2026) delivered this line on 31 May 1970 in “Living the Revolution,” her commencement address at Vassar College. She went on to co-found Ms. magazine in 1972 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She died at her home in New York City on 2 September 2026, aged 92, a few weeks before a new memoir was due to appear. Her point was not anti-education but pro-honesty: we arrive already full of assumptions — about gender, race, age and obedience — that we mistake for facts. Wisdom, on this account, is partly subtractive. Before you can add a true idea, you have to clear out a false one you were proud of.

— Gloria Steinem, “Living the Revolution,” Vassar College commencement (31 May 1970)

2. “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God, and tell the truth.”

Neem Karoli Baba (born Lakshman Narayan Sharma, c. 1900–1973) was an Indian spiritual teacher whose devotees called him Maharaj-ji. He died in Vrindavan on 11 September 1973 after slipping into a diabetic coma, and he wrote nothing himself; his teaching survives almost entirely through the disciples who carried it, among them Ram Dass. This four-part instruction is the closest thing he left to a formal creed. Each clause removes an escape hatch: not love the people who love you back, but everyone; not faith as a feeling, but service as an action; not truth when it is convenient, but always. There is a persistent story that Steve Jobs travelled to India to meet him. Jobs did make that journey, in 1974 — but Maharaj-ji had died the previous September, and the two never met. The teaching outlasted the teacher anyway.

— Neem Karoli Baba, four-part teaching (c. 1900–1973)

3. “Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) was an American bishop and one of the first televangelists, hosting Life Is Worth Living on the DuMont network from 12 February 1952. He won an Emmy Award in 1953 for Most Outstanding Television Personality, and in 2012 the Catholic Church declared him Venerable. This sentence comes from Program 19 of the televised series, later published in the book of the same name. Sheen was arguing against two familiar alibis — “everybody’s doing it” and “my conscience is clear” — and he names the thing both of them quietly deny. A judgment does not become true because it is popular, and a private certainty is not the same as a standard. Wisdom here means holding a principle steady while the room moves.

— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living, Program 19 (1951–1957)

4. “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be curious.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and went on to hold the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. This passage closes “A Brief History of Mine,” the address he recorded for his 70th-birthday symposium on 8 January 2012; too ill to attend in person, he sent his voice instead. He continued past the famous lines: “however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.” The advice is not to ignore the ground beneath you but to refuse to let it be the whole sky. Wonder is the appetite that wisdom feeds on, and Hawking, of all people, never lost it.

— Stephen Hawking, 70th-birthday address, Cambridge (8 January 2012)

5. “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

Warren Buffett (born 1930) has chaired Berkshire Hathaway since 1970 and built a reputation for plainspoken plain sense. He said this to students at Columbia Business School — his own alma mater — in 1993, answering a question about how he weighed investment risk. The remark was first printed by Jim Rasmussen in the Omaha World-Herald on 2 January 1994, and reached a wide audience through Robert Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way (1994). Eight words, and an entire theory of danger: risk is not a property of an asset, it is a property of the buyer’s ignorance. That is the same insight as Sheen’s, transposed from morality to money. Know the limits of what you understand, and you know where the cliff edge is.

— Warren Buffett, Columbia Business School (1993); Omaha World-Herald, 2 January 1994

6. “The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

Wendell Berry (1934–2026) was a Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist and essayist, the author of more than fifty books. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and delivered the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in 2012. He died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on 31 August 2026, aged 92. The sentence appears on page 14 of his essay collection Standing by Words (1983). It is a rebuke to both nostalgia and amnesia. You cannot cut yourself free from where you came from, and pretending otherwise simply leaves you repeating it. The only real exit runs forward, by making the next thing better than the last — which is what it means to stand by your words and your place.

— Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (1983), p. 14

7. “An understanding of the natural world and what’s in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfilment.”

David Attenborough (born 8 May 1926) turned 100 on 8 May 2026, still narrating. He joined the BBC in 1952, made his breakthrough with Zoo Quest in 1954, and reshaped how the world sees nature with Life on Earth (1979). This line was quoted in The Independent in 2017, and it sounds like a career condensed to a single idea. Attenborough has never asked his audience to be sentimental about nature; he has asked them to look closely, and trusted that close attention does the rest. Curiosity, in his telling, is not a diversion from a serious life. It is the engine of one — and the fulfilment it produces is available to anyone willing to pay attention to something other than themselves.

— David Attenborough, as quoted in The Independent (8 May 2017)

Create your own quote graphics

These quotes are meant to be shared. A well-designed quote graphic can stop a scroll, start a conversation, and steady someone at the right moment. Whether you are posting on Instagram, creating Pinterest pins, or designing WhatsApp statuses, Quotes Creator gives you ready-made templates, beautiful fonts, and custom gradients to bring any of these quotes to life in minutes.

Designing quote graphics for “Wisdom”

• ✓ Keep the palette quiet — deep indigo, ink blue, warm stone — wisdom reads as calm authority, not alarm
• ✓ Pair a classical serif for Steinem, Berry and Sheen with a clean humanist sans for Hawking, Buffett and Attenborough
• ✓ Reach for symbols of patience rather than power — open books, long roads, old trees, a night sky — and give them room to breathe
• ✓ Hold the line to two or three lines on mobile-sized graphics; a long sentence needs space more than it needs size
• ✓ Export a landscape crop for X and blog headers, and a square for Instagram and Pinterest