The School of Life is dedicated to teaching individuals how to lead a more fulfilled life. Their beautifully-designed products offer insights in the key ingredients of emotional well-being: how to form good relationships, minimize anxiety, acquire confidence and connect with friends.  

This boxed set of twenty cards (and a beechwood stand) explores what it means to be wise and how we can become more enlightened in our everyday lives.

Wisdom is one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty it doesn’t sound like something we could ever be. But wisdom deserves to take its place among other, more typical aspirations; we should be as keen to end up wise as we are to be thin or prosperous.

Wisdom is just a very beautiful word for a set of qualities of character that enable us to face reality with serenity, good humor, kindness and resilience. It is a skill that can be learned, in part, by knowing what it is we are aiming at.

This is a guide to wisdom and a gentle and elegant visual reminder to remain as wise as we are at our best and calmest moments.

Qualities examined include Self-Acceptance, Politeness, Envy, Selfishness, Gratitude,  Resilience, Regrets, Sane Insanity, Forgiveness, Worldliness, Folly, Melancholy, Self-Knowledge, Simplicity, Vulnerability, and Calm.

Quotes from the cards:

On Realism:  "The wise are, first and foremost, ‘realistic’ about how difficult many things will be. Knowing that something difficult is being attempted doesn’t rob the wise of ambitions, but it makes them more steadfast, calmer and less prone to panic about the problems that will invariably come their way."

On Folly:  "The wise take seriously the business of laughing at themselves. They hedge their pronouncements; they are skeptical in their conclusions. Their certainties are not as brittle as those of others."

Boxed set measures 8 1/2" x 6 1/4"