Prudence Quotes

Silence is the sanctuary of prudence. (Baltasar Gracián)
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. View quote
Mark Twain
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit. View quote
Jonathan Swift
Wisdom, prudence, forethought, these are essential. But not second to these that noble courage which adventures the right, and leaves the consequences to God. View quote
Robert Dale Owen
I said that this would be a Budget based on prudence for a purpose and that guides us also in our approach to public spending. View quote
Gordon Brown
Alcohol-inspired fights ... are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order. View quote
Alain de Botton
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull if you talk, you are thought impertinent or arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates. View quote
William Hazlitt
Can you also, Lucullus, affirm that there is any power united with wisdom and prudence which has made, or, to use your own expression, manufactured man? What sort of a manufacture is that? Where is it exercised? when? why? how? View quote
Cicero
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. (William Ewart Gladstone)
I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence. View quote
William Ewart Gladstone
We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters. View quote
Robert E. Lee
If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify. View quote
Alexander Hamilton
Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance and the parent of Liberty. View quote
Samuel Johnson
You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is.. God help him. View quote
Khaled Hosseini
My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own. View quote
Maria Edgeworth
The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life. View quote
François de La Rochefoucauld
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and switfly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock. View quote
Jonathan Edwards (theologian)
Low inflation and government prudence may be harmful for economic development. View quote
Ha-Joon Chang
My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
[Prudence] replaces [strength] by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed. View quote
Nicolas Chamfort
But yet they that have no Science, are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by their mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
What have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed. View quote
T. S. Eliot
Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity. View quote
William Blake