touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Now consider the difference between advice and wisdom. To my mind, wisdom is what enables one to bear the inevitable; it offers the solace of recognizing and accepting the limits of doing. With wisdom, one can endure what is necessary, inescapable, unchangeable. It is retrospective and essentially theoretical. Advice, on the other hand, is prospective and essentially practical. It offers counsel on altering for the better what is still subject to change. Deliberate counsel given through wise judgments, enabling one to alter future actions, makes advice useful.
—Morris Philipson
Foreword to Jacques Barzun on Writing, Editing, and Publishing: Essays Explicative and Hortatory (1971)
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