What does wisdom mean to you / how do you seek and gain wisdom?

as the ubiquitous artist Kenny Rogers said ” you need to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em and know when to run away.”

I.Q. is recogizing patterens…wisdom is recogizing what patterns are needed and which are useless.

Always challenge your assumptions and commit yourself to lifelong learning.

My name means wisdom. I think you gain wisdom through life experiences. You have to take risks to add to this wisdom.

In my estimation, wisdom is how you utilize the long and short-term knowledge/information that you have acquired. Many people can recite factual information, but not be able to put it to any use. I think wisdom ties in with morality, and helps us to subconsciously know what behaviour is appropriate. Great question.

A defunct social networking site.

I think wisdom, unlike knowledge, has a lot to do with experience. Gaining wisdom, to me, is learning from your mistakes.

This is a really great and thought-provoking question, which I will follow. I am a little tired so I’ll keep it short, but the first thing that came to mind was that with age comes wisdom. I think it’s individual, but with me I think that in my forties I really started to learn more, or rather, get more curious and retain new information, as opposed to when I was younger. Does that makes sense to anyone?

GQ!

Wisdom can be gained from a textbook or from experience, but it’s such a vague, generic term that isn’t it’s true definition in the eye of the beholder, for the most part?

I have some medical knowledge so making decisions about my health and understanding fundamentally what is going on with it absolutely helps me make all kinds of decisions, including what food to buy, what drugs to trust, what health advice to follow. In this case, I think the knowledge I gained from a textbook helped me make more “wise” decisions.

I think with the experience part, it just helps you to not make the same mistakes again, if you end up down the same decision path as before. Perhaps it also allows one to pass on that knowledge we gained, making us “wiser” to those less experienced.

I agree with others that you can never have too much wisdom, and it’s always when you think you’re “wise” that something unexpected comes into your life and shows you how there’s always more to learn in this life. :)

Knowledge is the accumulation of facts.
Wisdom is knowledge applied intelligently.

I don’t know how one becomes wise
but the acquisition of wisdom certainly begins
with the acknowledgment that

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know. I have always, all my life, tried to know what’s true, expose unexamined assumptions, see things from the other’s point of view, remain open to experience, and keep asking questions. I have never tried to be wise. At some point I began to hear people tell me I was wise, and I’m afraid that my first thought was “I guess I must be old now.” At times I know I am quick and impulsive. At other times I am deliberate and reflective. At which of those times am I wiser?

My toothbrush. I believe it’s in the bathroom.

To me, wisdom is a deep understanding of life that allows circumvention of unimportance.

It is often epiphanic in nature, being something that is not acquired, but occurs to who it will.