I went out into the world claiming to seek wisdom. but what i really sought were answers. And it is now perhaps my only clear conclusion that wisdom is the ability to know the difference. There is no general wisdom of the kind I sought. The sort of wisdom that is alluded to in aphorisms and cliches. Wisdom is knowing the limits of this wisdom. That it is entirely situational, and rarely general, if at all.
There are countless ideas sayings and so-called wisdoms that can justify nearly any way of living. They all sound good, because they all are. But by the same token, none are. All ideas and cliches and wisdoms are both true and false, meaningful and meaningless, depending on where and when and how they are applied. Even the most brilliant thoughts and lines ever written or uttered across history inevitably face their falsehoods, hypocrisies, and righteous oppositions. One can travel the world and back, through books or on their own two feet, just to discover that the answers are not out there. But perhaps one does not need answers, nor certainty, nor solace of this form. Bad things happen. Life is an impossible puzzle, missing a majority of its pieces. To live it in its ordinary form is courage. To find meaning in its mundane meaninglessness is sort of genius. To just exist for the time one has and to do one's best, that's wise enough. It need not be more complicated than that. One should always be learning and listening and considering the ideas and words of others, but i think i know now that this wisdom is always a means and rarely an end.

i rather have the impression that you have to be strong and happy to help people in misfortune. He who drags his life and succumbs beneath his own burden cannot help anyone on the contrary, the one who dominates his life, this one here can be truly generous and give effectively.

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in future I won’t be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life. Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that It was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we teach only the dead.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; -
Turn where so ever I may,
By night or day.
The things which i have seen i now can see no more.