How to Find Wisdom

The Art of Finding, Reflecting On, and Living In Light of Wisdom

Jul 29, 2025

For at least the past 13 years I’ve been studying philosophy. I’ve been an autodidact, lay philosopher fumbling around thinking I’ve discovered the secrets to the universe. I’ve also been a graduate philosophy student wondering if I really understand anything at all. It’s been a wild ride.

As Dr. Timothy Brookins notes, the word ‘philosopher’, from the Greek term philosophos, wisdom lover, likely started out as a pejorative term hurled against Pythagoras. It seems that initially it was meant to connote “one who wants to be wise” rather than one who is a genuine wiseman or sage, a sophos.

Pythagoras, like the true sage that he was, just ate the insult and adopted the term for himself. Sure, he was a wisdom lover, a philosopher, and what he taught was ‘philosophy’, the love of wisdom. No problem.

Pythagoras: the Lover of ~~Triangles~~ Wisdom

But today, the ‘wisdom tradition’ and the philosophical tradition(s) have come apart. Philosophers, for the most part, don’t really pitch themselves, nor even think of themselves as, sages or gurus or wisemen (or wisewomen) who try to help you live the good life anymore, and they probably shouldn’t. Philosophy is something different today, and that’s actually alright (there are a few small pockets of philosophers seeking to retrieve “philosophy-as-a-way-of-life” and that’s cool too).

Philosophy today—at least in the Anglo-American ‘analytic’ tradition—is more about learning to think rather than learning what to think. It’s more about sharpening your reasoning skills so that you can go out and think clearly about the problems you’re interested in. That’s admirable, and valuable, and we need lots and lots of it—especially today! Support your local philosophers—and your non-local philosophers! Just support philosophy, we all need it.

But if you want to find wisdom, that is, the stuff you should think, you don’t go into academic philosophy. So where do you go? How does one find wisdom?

Well, as the book of Proverbs tells us, the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom! And whatever you get, get insight! (Proverbs 4:7)

So if you want to find wisdom, the first step is to start looking for it.

In this post I’m going to show you 4 ways to find wisdom: 2 ways to find wisdom from others and 2 ways to find wisdom from yourself. Here’s the breakdown:

Finding Wisdom from Others
1. Gleaning Wisdom from Art, Media, and ‘Content’
2. Soliciting Wisdom from Everyday-Sages in Your life
Finding Wisdom from Yourself
1. Logging Your Experiences and Abstracting Wisdom from Them
2. Generating Your Own Wise Sayings from Your Thoughts

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But before we jump in, I am going to do the pedantic analytic philosopher thing and ask “what do we mean by ‘wisdom’?” If you’re going to go out and find it, we should at least know what it is we’re looking for.

What is wisdom?

There are plenty of different ways to define it, characterize it, or otherwise point it out. I’ll have more to say about definitions of wisdom in future posts, but for now let me just share my favorite definition, which happens to be the one my dad has repeated indoctrinated me with ever since I was a kid:

Wisdom is the proper application of knowledge.

It may not be perfect, but it’s a pretty good definition. So you have knowledge of something, right? That’s great, but can you apply that knowledge in the right way and at the right time in order to live well? If so, then you’ve got yourself some wisdom. If not, then you don’t.

I tend to think of a triad of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Knowledge is like the basic building block or material. Wisdom is the proper application of that knowledge—maybe the building? And then understanding is something like knowing-why—the schematics?—it’s not a great analogy. But understanding is knowing-why a particular item of knowledge (a proposition, say) is true, not just that it is true. ‘Understanding’ gets why the application of that knowledge in that way constitutes wisdom or is the wise thing to do.

I think you can have knowledge without wisdom. We all know super smart and knowledgable people who’ve made a shipwreck of their lives, and hence aren’t wise. You can likewise imagine knowing a truth, and applying that truth in the right situation at the right time while not fully understanding the mechanisms at play or the deeper principles at work. You might know it’s good to invest, and you might wisely entrust your financial manager to invest your money, and yet you may not fully understand compound interest, for instance.

But more on the relations between wisdom, knowledge, and understanding in future posts.

Let’s jump in with way #1 for finding wisdom from others.

Finding Wisdom from Others

1. Gleaning Wisdom from Art, Media, and ‘Content’

The best way to start finding wisdom from others is to start looking for it everywhere. That means look for wisdom in the books you read, the poems and podcasts you hear, the movies and TV shows you watch, and the other ‘content’ you ‘consume’. The other day someone compared and contrasted ‘content’ with ‘art’ and it’s slowing poisoning the word for me—but don’t let that mess with you too. ‘Content’ includes those Stoic-quote instagram pages and Substack publications you follow and whatever else you follow which could be dispensing out wise sayings.

Keep your eyes peeled and your ears ready. For those who have ears let them hear? That’s you! Start hearing.

The best way I’ve found to help myself stay on the lookout for wisdom is to start a commonplace book of wise sayings. Once I started a small notebook dedicated to collecting wise sayings, I was suddenly way more cognizant of when they passed through my awareness. I was way more alert—partially because I now had a notebook to fill!

A commonplace book is a collection of quotations, usually organized according to a particular scope and for a particular purpose, often according to ‘commonplaces’ or common headings.

Start a commonplace book for the wise sayings you find—that’s the scope—and use it as a storehouse or treasury book to read through later in order to absorb the wisdom you’ve gleaned and collated—that’s the purpose. You don’t need to add any ‘commonplaces’ or headings/tags to this commonplace book because it’s your own book of sententiae (wise sayings) and by flipping through it regularly, you’ll become well acquainted with the sayings inside and where to find particular entries. It’ll also do you good to not be “ultra efficient” with this commonplace book, because as you flip through the notebook looking for a saying, you’ll also be reminded of all the other sayings you’ve collected. The more exposure to wisdom, the better.

Pictured above is my pocket proverbs commonplace book of wisdom. It’s an A6 Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook. I draw a line separating the quotation portion from the citation portion and then I let it rip. It’s that simple. I then collect sententiae (wise sayings) from everywhere.

Sententiae is a Latin word for wise sayings which is a broad wisdom category including aphorisms, proverbs, epigrams, maxims, axioms, dictums, gnomic statements, idioms, platitudes, short parables, and even certain riddles. I get that to many these all seem like the same thing, but there are important differences. More on the differences in a future post and in my forthcoming book, Journal Like a Philosopher.

So in my pocket proverbs CPB (more accurately termed pocket sententiae), I have quotes from philosophers, aphorisms from science fiction authors, epigrams from cartoon shows, ancient proverbs and proverbs from podcasts, dictums from the wizards of fantasy novels, and much, much more. It doesn’t matter where I find it, if it’s a wise saying that I want to apply to my life, or that I’d like to pass along to younger men I work with or with my own daughter some day, I collect it in my notebook.

If there’s a fictional character that’s meant to be a wise old sage, a wise wizard, an old cowboy, a kung fu master, etc., then chances are you might get some real wisdom from them. If the authors write them well, they’ll have to tap into true wisdom in order to immerse the reader/viewer into the story. So be on the look out. Likewise, good non-fiction authors will often drop in sententiae to summarize their passages or will include them as epigraphs before each chapter to set the tone for what you’re about to read.

Once you start looking for wise sayings you’ll start seeing them everywhere.

Additionally, you should start reading some intentionally and notoriously wise books. Read the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. Read Blaise Pascal’s Pensées or Georg Lichtenberg’s Waste Books. Read St. Augustine’s Confessions or Erasmus’s the Praise of Folly. Read Gordon Clark’s Thales to Dewy. Read Frank Herbert’s Dune. Or come join us right now the our read-along of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. My first companion essay on it drops tomorrow (July 30th 2025). You still have time to grab the book, and read book 1 before my second companion essay drops next week—it’s a short work!

I only recently started sharing the wise sayings I’ve been collecting with you all here on Substack. But so far I’ve written up four entries in my digital commonplace book of wisdom called Sayings of the Sages. So if you want to get a jump start on your own wisdom CPB, you can grab as many sayings as you want from mine:

Sayings of the Sages | Pt. 1 of A Commonplace Book of Wisdom

Parker Settecase

Feb 12

Read full story

So start collecting wise sayings and put them in your own notebook. But let me just give a quick caveat: collecting sententiae is not equal to wisdom. It’s not enough to just collect wise sayings—you have to live your life in light of wisdom to be wise. But it helps if you have a whole treasury of wise sayings to reflect on and try to live out each day. So start today.

2. Solicit Wisdom From the Everyday-Sages in Your Life

So now you know how to find wisdom generally, but what about wisdom applied to your very own situation? Sure you could apply wise sayings to your life—you should, in fact! You must!—but what about sage counsel? What about wise advice that’s applicable right here and now, no contextualization needed?

Here I’d like to encourage you to seek out wise counsel from the sages you already have in your life, and then if that fails—or if you don’t currently have those kinds of counselors—go out and find yourself some or some more sages.

Advice is like applied wisdom. It helps if the advisor knows you or at least has a detailed—more objective, less biased—picture of the situation you’re facing. And I don’t just mean troubling situations, sometimes having a lot of potential can be paralyzing and you need help thinking through your options—but yes, obviously in the troubling times it’s immensely beneficial to have a sage on your side.

Who are the sages I have in mind? Pastors, priests, elders, deacons, trust-worthy professors, particularly wise neighbors, actual counselors and therapists, fathers, perhaps a wise older sibling, grandfathers (doesn’t even have to be your own here, steal someone else’s wise grandfather if you gotta!)—these are the kinds of everyday sages who may be sitting on a goldmine of overlooked wise advice. Some may know it, but others may be unaware that they have what you need—you’ll have to draw it out of those latter folks but that’s fun too, you’ll get to watch them discover they have wisdom right before your very eyes.

These everyday-sages don’t have to fully embody the wisdom of the philosophical-sage of old. You’re probably not going to find Socrates or Christ. But they will have wisdom in particular areas and it’s in those areas that you’ll want to solicit their wisdom on—shimmers of Socrates and shimmers of Christ.

Maybe you’re looking to propose to your girlfriend so you ask an older guy who is a commendable husband for advice. Now if he’s wise in one area, chances are it will bleed over into others, but maybe he has bad advice on investing or something else. That’s fine, just eat the meat and spit the bones. He’s not your cult leader, here’s an everyday sage who has a great marriage and you’re looking for his advice on how you too can have a great one. You don’t need to worship this dude and blindly follow everything (or anything) he says.

So, solicit wisdom from those people who are already in your life. Ask the business tycoon “what’re the three keys to money?” and see what he says. He or she probably doesn’t have “three keys” or principles locked and loaded to spit out but chances are their answer will be worth hearing, whether they come up with ad hoc principles or explain to you why that’s the wrong kind of question to be asking in the first place. My dad used to do this with the exorbitantly wealthy folks he worked for. One day, one of the older rich dudes hit him back with “the first rule of money is this: keep the money”. It was very instructive to my father and myself, who both tend to be spendthrifts.

If you don’t have access to every-day sages then you need to remedy that. Find some older, wiser folks, and ask them if you can take them out to coffee or lunch to pick their brain or ask for their advice. You’ll find and metabolize more wisdom than you’d expect just by having friendships with people older or further along than you, with people around your same station, and with those behind you or younger than you. You get wisdom from above, be able to discuss it with your peers, and then be able to pass it along to the next generation, making you into their every-day sage.

Yoinked this great picture of Gandalf in the archives of Minas Tirith from here

3. Log Your Experiences and Abstract Wisdom from Them

Some of you have your hackles up because it sounds like I’m about to say “find wisdom from within”. I’m not going to say that. Instead, I’m going to suggest that you start keeping a diary and abstracting out wisdom from your daily experiences. A diary is not just for teenage girls—but good on them for keeping them going!

Diaries, from the Latin dies/diarium meaning ‘day’, are for capturing your experiences and logging your emotions. “What happened today and how did I feel about that? Why is that?” It’s a record of the events that you’ve lived through and the facts of the matter both external and internal, with or without analysis.

I shouldn’t have to ‘manly’ this concept up for you, but I will. Bros can and should keep diaries too! Don’t be an effeminate effete little tool letting life happen to you without self-examination. Collect data on yourself and analyze that data for trends, then change your behavior accordingly or reinforce those habits which are helping your find success in different areas of your live. Boom.

Ladies, many of you know the benefits of keeping a diary. Good work. But if you don’t, just start keeping one to log your experiences and reflect back on what happened.

The unexamined life is not worth living—so start examining your life by keeping a daily, weekly, or monthly diary—daily or like tri-weekly is probably best. Once you’ve logged your experiences, go back and analyze them. It doesn’t have to be right after you’re done logging—in fact it might be better to give your entries some time to breathe before going back and trying to take a more objective look at them. But go back and look for patterns and trends and draw wisdom from them—either wisdom for your own life or wise principles in general. Do you keep falling into the same trap? Do you keep finding success when you post the same kinds of Substack posts? Collect data and start working towards making some wise judgements.

When you’ve derived what you think constitutes wisdom from your experiences, run that wisdom by your mentors and friends—“hey, I way thinking about my week and I think I came up with a wise principle, how does this sound…?”

4. Generating Your Own Wise Sayings from Your Thoughts

This one is probably the most difficult but most fun way to find wisdom: make it up yourself. Get a notebook and try to write your own sententiae based on your own thoughts and opinions.

If you’ve been trying out ways (1-3) already, then you’ve been exposed to all sorts of wise sayings, everyday-sage advice, and you’ve had experience abstracting wisdom from your experiences—now it’s time to try and create your own wise sayings.

I keep a notebook dedicated to my own aphorisms. It’s a journal—that is, it’s a collection of thoughts, as opposed to a diary which is a collection of events and emotions—where I try to pitch my thoughts, beliefs, sentiments, intuitions, and opinions in aphorisms. Aphorisms are a particular kind of sententiae that are brief, isolated (or self-contained, they don’t need reference to a larger work like an epigraph does), witty, and they’re philosophical.

For more on aphorisms and aphoristic philosophy, check out this post below and expect more Notebook Philosophy posts on sententiae in the near future: