Wisdom has existed at all times. If you believe the biblical stories, it existed even before humanity appeared. Solomon writes in parables on behalf of Wisdom:
I was born before the mountains were erected, before the hills, when He had not yet created the earth, nor the fields, nor the beginning grains of dust of the universe (Proverbs 8:25-26).
Wisdom is the artist of the world. And lovers of chemistry, biology or other science will confirm: the world is arranged wisely.
Wisdom is valued by people. She brings joy. The mind is no less revered. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine the difference between an intelligent person and a wise one. Confucius, Socrates and other thinkers of the past did not draw a clear line between the meanings of these words, but in the modern world there is such a tendency.
Three steps
Usually in the human mind the words “stupid”, “smart”, “wise” are placed in a certain order - according to the degree of their significance for a person. These are stages of development where stupidity takes last place and wisdom is valued above all else. The following statements are floating around the world: “Good grades don’t mean anything” or “Smart in school is stupid in life.” And indeed it is. An educated person is not necessarily smart, and an intelligent person is not necessarily wise.
Before finding the differences between intelligence and wisdom, it is worth determining how an intelligent person differs from a stupid one.
Pursuing positive and constructive goals
From time immemorial, wise people have pursued exclusively creative goals. Tsars, kings and other rulers, famous for their wisdom, tried by any means to improve the well-being of their citizens. If the monarch was not creative, then the people would soon overthrow him from the throne. In our time, the situation has not changed. Wise people pursue global goals that allow them to sow goodness in the world. For example, if a truly wise person works in an office, then he will first of all think not about increasing earnings, but about improving the atmosphere among the team.
Who's smart here?
Note. A smart person can be distinguished from a stupid person by certain signs.
- An intelligent person is able to change his point of view because he questions everything. He is open to gaining new knowledge and development. Whereas it is useless to argue with a stupid person.
- Smart people study a situation thoroughly before drawing conclusions.
- They have a good sense of humor. Their jokes are not superficial, but have a deep meaning.
- For smart people, a mistake is a failed attempt. They learn from their mistakes and try not to make the same mistakes.
- An intelligent person has an appropriate environment - he communicates with his peers, because this allows him to develop. Moreover, he communicates with a purpose without wasting his time.
As they say, it is better to be smart and stupid than to be stupid and smart. Having intelligence does not always save a person from stupidity, because it is human nature to sometimes be guided by emotions and feelings. And sometimes act out of habit. So a person can make mistakes simply because he is not used to “turning on” his mind when needed. Not everyone likes to think. You also need to learn this and train yourself in this.
However, besides the mind, there is something more mysterious, and that is wisdom.
Today in the magazine MORE we will look at 9 main principles that a wise person follows in life
It turns out that becoming wise is not so difficult. And all these principles are as simple as daylight. The main thing is to learn to stick to them and not stray from the intended path.
But a wise man will never:
- allowing others to ruin your mood;
- forget old grievances;
- overestimate your strength;
- chasing an unattainable goal;
- live in the past with its failures and mistakes;
- obsess over problems;
- communicate with losers and pessimists;
- keep evil inside;
- agree to everything to your detriment.
We are always fascinated by people who know how to maintain balance (and we are not talking about sports now), who are resistant to negative environmental factors, who know how to show composure when necessary and do not lose their composure. How do they manage to do this? How do they manage to control themselves? Did nature reward them with such qualities, or were they able to cultivate them in themselves, develop and improve them to the required level through some specific training? What's the secret?
And the secret, as we have already said, is in the principles of life, which must be strictly adhered to and which must be followed in the desire to become wiser.
Let us dwell in more detail on each of these points of the rule of a wise man:
1) Don't let anyone ruin your mood
If the opinions of others and their success in business determine your mood, then, unfortunately, you still need to learn wisdom. You need to work on your self-esteem. People with high self-esteem are not bothered by the successes of others, they do not compare themselves with anyone, they do not look up to anyone. Their own successes are important to them, they are pleased with their own successes, and they don’t care about others.
A wise person strives to become the best version of himself without being like anyone else!
2) You can forgive, but not forget
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A wise person knows how to forgive past grievances. He does not hold a grudge against his offenders, but this does not mean at all that he has forgotten everything and let the situation go. By analyzing the situation, a wise person will draw certain conclusions, gain experience and knowledge that will help him decide on his further actions towards the offender.
A wise person, knowing in advance what can await him in a relationship with such a person, will already be prepared and will be able, if necessary, to protect himself from such an unpleasant person.
3) Overestimate yourself and your capabilities
Self-confidence is, of course, good, but sometimes it wouldn’t hurt to evaluate the current situation and how life-threatening it is. If we take any conflict situation as an example, then at any moment emotions can take over and prevent the right decision from being made. And in a fit of anger, rage and anger, you can chop a lot of firewood.
Therefore, you are required not only to assess the complexity of the task placed on your shoulders, to calculate your strength, but also to learn to keep your emotions under control.
4) In pursuit of the ideal
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Striving for ideal is good. But there is nothing ideal in our life, and, as a rule, an ideal is something unattainable - a dream, a desire, a goal. And in pursuit of the ideal, we can waste a lot of energy and effort without achieving anything. Therefore, instead of sand castles, it is better to set yourself more achievable goals and specific tasks.
As they say, a bird in the hand is better than a pie in the sky. And instead of abstract goals, concrete ones are better. And ideals, by the way, tend to quickly depreciate.
5) Live by past failures
Everyone makes mistakes. And someone can score more than one bump until they achieve what they want. Everyone faces difficulties and failures along the way. But they should not confuse you in any way. On the contrary, difficulties strengthen us and only make us stronger and more resilient.
We learn from mistakes and failures, and using past experiences as an example, we turn all our failures, defeats and failures into successes.
6) Focus on problems
Some, when faced with a problem, simply give up and begin to obsess over it. This only increases self-doubt and self-confidence. Negative thoughts in your head do not give you peace and the opportunity to switch, to start looking for a way out of the situation. This only escalates, and the situation gets worse, preventing you from moving on and trying to change something for the better. This is the wrong tactic.
You shouldn’t constantly think about the problem, but you need to look for ways to solve it and get rid of it.
7) Dealing with whiners and weaklings
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Having driven away all bad thoughts about failures, drive away people who think only about bad things. A pessimistic attitude in life only depresses you. Their melancholy rubs off on you. These people live under constant stress. Is this what you're missing in your life? Because when communicating with such “whiners,” you unwittingly transfer their situations into your life. To prevent this, simply protect yourself from such people.
Or there is another option for solving the problem: help this person get out of the shackles of failure and see the light at the end of the tunnel, teaching the person not to focus on the problem, but to look for ways to solve it.
Keep evil inside
It’s the same as multiplying negativity, poisoning your own health. The destructive power of evil does not give you the opportunity to develop, experience positive emotions and strive for fundamental changes.
If you constantly focus on the evil that has brought and continues to bring you nothing but suffering, you will not be able to draw any conclusions and try to change the situation for the better.
9) Stop agreeing with everything
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to be able to say “No!” To do this, you need to clearly set life priorities, be aware of your true desires, not imposed from the outside. Learn to first achieve harmony with yourself. This will make it easier for you to refuse to another person what you do not want to do, something that will not bring you any pleasure or benefit.
Parable
Parables were written about everything. They answered no matter what questions. The question of how a wise person differs from a smart person is answered in parables extremely rarely, but it still happens. Below is an example.
Once upon a time Knowledge, Cunning and Intelligence met. Knowledge and Cunning began to argue which of them was more important. The mind stayed away in order to maintain good relations with them and subsequently use both. But the dispute flared up, and they persistently began to pester Umu so that he would make a judgment as to which of them was more important. The mind decided to shift this responsibility onto the Wise. Because he was an authority for him too. Wise was Uma's uncle, although they did not communicate often. And so the three of them went to the Wise One and knocked on the door. His wife, Conscience, revealed it to them. It turned out that the Wise One was not at home. Conscience told me that this does not happen often, and few now consult with the Wise. When Intelligence, Knowledge and Cunning returned, Intelligence told them: “You see, no one needs the Wise One with his truth, so be happy with what you have.”
From the parable it is clear that a smart person has a lot of knowledge and cunning. Although a person who knows a lot is not always smart. Perhaps the person just has a good memory. Wisdom is close to conscience and is the head of everything. The parable clearly shows the difference between a wise person and a smart person. The first is necessarily associated with good (he helps people, his wife is Conscience), the second is not always (his friends are Cunning and Knowledge, he acts in such a way as to benefit).
Types of intelligence
There are two types of intelligence - verbal and non-verbal. Most often, a person develops a specific type. However, it happens that both types develop in parallel. Then the person’s personality will be completely harmonious.
Verbal intelligence . This type of intelligence refers to a person’s ability to think while speaking. He can think through further steps in the conversation without being distracted from the dialogue;
Nonverbal intelligence is the ability to skillfully operate with images in one’s own mind. This type of thinking is possessed mainly by creative individuals.
A person, in the course of his life, develops both types of thinking. It all depends on age. For example, the level of development of verbal thinking in a child will be lower than in an adult. However, the child has more developed non-verbal thinking.
The meaning of the word "wisdom"
Wisdom cannot be precisely defined. It is often associated with experience and with old age, with emotional balance and the ability to make decisions in difficult situations so that everyone is happy.
Wisdom is a certain balance between strength and weakness, confidence and doubt, severity and gentleness, one’s own interests and the interests of others. She is harmonious.
No one will call an evil smart person wise. Perhaps they will call him cunning. Perhaps a genius, but not wise. Because the adjective “wise” is exclusively positive. So what is the difference between a wise person and an intelligent person? Below are the main signs.
Tips for women
Many beautiful women would dream of being born with a ready-made life experience, but this is impossible, so they have to move along the road of existence, studying its lessons and making mistakes on a pile of mistakes.
After all, the life values of maturity cannot be compared with the ideals of serene youth.
Below are tips on how to become a wise woman:
– learn to accept changes;
– live in the present moment;
– put aside laziness;
– do not impose your help on others, engage in solving your own problems;
– develop intuition;
– spend a sufficient amount of time in the “embraces of Morpheus”;
– understand that what is important in friends is not their quantity, but quality;
– ignore inappropriate people;
– give up envy by increasing self-esteem;
– gain an understanding that only by loving one’s own person can one realize the significance of mutual love;
– forget about the events of the past, there is only today;
– not to be afraid of adequate risk;
– constantly develop and engage in self-education;
– understand that the morning is still wiser than the evening;
- everything passes.
It is very important for a woman to gain wisdom, because the climate of family relationships with her beloved and the weather in the house depend on the daughters of Eve. After all, a woman in one person needs to be a reasonable adviser, a strict but gentle mentor, a faithful comrade, a gentle wife, a good housewife, a seductive heterosexual and a passionate lover to her husband.
That is why it is important for every young beauty to know how to become wise in relationships. First of all, it is necessary to understand and accept that ideals do not exist, but at the same time, each person has only his own “set” of qualities, his own advantages, advantageous features, and disadvantages. You need to learn to appreciate your loved one for the totality of his positive qualities and despite his shortcomings.
A wise woman does not live for the approval of others; she loves, respects and values her own personality, and therefore does not build relationships only on emotional outbursts. There is no need to waste your own time on marginalized people, abusers, married men. Living with an alcoholic or drug addict is not the duty of a good Samaritan, it is not supporting your beloved spouse, it is disrespect and dislike for yourself.
A partner must be worthy, and a wise woman must value her own time. If the chosen one is immature, lazy, or rude, then you should not waste a second of time on him.
A wise woman is aware of her own “role” in a marriage relationship, so she will never try on male functions. She also trusts her partner and does not stoop to total control. Marriage does not mean deprivation of freedom and obtaining exclusive rights to own each other. Any mature person needs his own free space. There is no need for your loved one to “clip his wings.” He will repay trust and freedom threefold with love and care for his wise wife.
How to acquire wisdom
Almost every person sometimes shows wisdom. If you ask a person to remember where he acted wisely, he will definitely find such a situation. And what happens sometimes can happen more often over time.
To learn to balance between severity and gentleness, your own interests and those of others, to look at the situation from different sides, you can develop the habit of looking at yourself as if from above (from space or from heaven), thus abstracting from your feelings. You can also think of yourself in the third person, as some kind of Dasha or some kind of Petya. This works because it is easier for a person to judge wisely about someone else's life than about his own.
The main thing is to move in this direction, then both wisdom and love will come. And life may become easier.
Wise people develop using crisis.
It often happens that negative experiences have the best effect on a person's wisdom. This is why people who have experienced psychological trauma seem especially wise. Research confirms this: people who endure adversity become stronger as a result.
Most of us have had some negative experience in life that has forced us to rethink important things. However, we do not have to experience a crisis to become wise.
We can improve our wisdom by learning from events every day. We can choose how to respond to negative situations, and making the right choices in a difficult situation can help us become wiser.
The first interpretations of the concept under consideration
They are indicated in the first dictionaries of the Russian language of the 11th – 12th centuries, namely:
- reason, prudence, intelligence are wisdom;
- scholarship, body of knowledge - great wisdom;
- moral perfection, spiritual purity - humility;
- religious piety is wisdom;
- mastery, perfection, skill - perfect wisdom;
- slyness, trickery, cunning - sophistication.
Folk wisdom and ethnic survival
Folk art is the most important moment in human activity regarding mastery of one’s own internal and external world. When a representative of the human race separated himself from the outside world, it was then that the search for himself, his place began. Man expressed the result of all this through oral creativity: the creation of wise proverbs, cunning riddles, funny and sad ritual songs, magical, everyday tales, solemn epics about great heroic deeds, which were chanted to the mesmerizing ringing of strings. All of them, one might say, are imbued with the wisdom of their ancestors and contain national, universal values.
Folk wisdom is, without exaggeration, one of the most important components of folk art, a treasury of national, universal values that have been developed by the masses over many generations.
Such wisdom consists of very ancient forms of practical and spiritual exploration of the world. At the same time, it is a modern product of the social life of the entire people, a unique phenomenon of social consciousness that has a separate immanent logic, ethics and epistemology.
Folk wisdom is often equated to different sections of folk art, as a rule, to folklore and its genres. These two concepts (“folklore”, “folk wisdom”) today in the Russian language do not coincide, since the first is both broader in scope and more specific than the second.
Wisdom is an ambiguous and multifaceted concept; each researcher interprets it in his own way, since the etymology of the word “philosophy” is tied to “love of wisdom.”
However, among the philosophical literature, three main directions in the interpretation of this concept can be distinguished. Thus, the word “sophia,” despite the fact that it is translated as “wisdom,” means both a subjective state of mind and an objective (real) state of affairs: beauty, harmony, perfection. It also contains a fairly clear indication of creativity. Based on this, wisdom is interpreted as “a special form of human reflection on the surrounding existence, of course, based both, according to Losev, on the mental-discursive method of spiritual everyday development (through categories, concepts), and on the intuitive position of the surrounding world (with the help of symbols , images)".
In Vasmer Max's dictionary
wise wise, mudra, wisely, ukr. wise, other Russian wise, old-slav madr φρόνιμος, σοφός (Supr.), Bulgarian. Madar, Serbohorv. mudar, mudra, adv. wisely, Slovenian. módǝr, Czech. moudrý, slvts. múdry, Polish mądry, v.-luzh., n.-luzh. mudry. Related Lit. mandrùs “cheerful, proud, perky”, lt. muôdrs “vigorous, lively”, Old Indian. mēdhā́ f. “wisdom, reason, understanding, thought”, mandhātár- m. “pious”, Avest. mązdra- “wise, intelligent”, mąz-dā-, maz-dā- “keep in memory” mǝn dadē “remember”, d.-v.-n. muntar “zealous, dexterous, lively, vigorous”, Goth. mundōn sis “look at the ch.-l.”, Old Norse. munda “to mark”, Greek. μανθάνω, aor. ἔμαθον “learning, noticing, understanding”, Alb. mund “I can, I conquer” (see Jocles (Stud. 58), Barich (Albrum. Stud. I, 105) against G. Mayer (Alb. Wb. 291)); see I. Schmidt, Vok. I, 170; Trautman, BSW 168 et seq.; Endzelin, SBE 198; Brugman. Grdr. 2, 1, 378; Specht, KZ 63, 92 et seq.; Frenkel, ZfslPh 20, 74. Further connected with I.-E. *men- (Meye, De indoeur. radice *men- 41).
