Wisdom?

"It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb -- the 'immemorial wisdom' said to reside in peasants and other 'simple folk' -- where rules of science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live."

"It is the ever present sense of this framework -- of this movement of events, or changing pattern of characteristics -- as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power, that is the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his realism, his pessimism, and his contempt for the faith placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense."

"Tolstoy himself knows that the truth is there, and not 'here' -- not in the regions susceptible to observation, discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time."

The Hedgehog and the Fox