Wisdom Of The Week

Excerpts from the book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant. 

At age seventy-five, the College men were asked to define what they considered wisdom to be. Here are some of their definitions of wisdom:

• Empathy through which one must synthesize both care and justice.
• Tolerance and a capacity to appreciate paradox and irony even as one learns to manage uncertainty.
• A seamless integration of affect and cognition. 
• Self-awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption.
• The capacity to ‘hear’ what others say.