India, July 20 -- l Too much of anything. l Don't count your chickens. l A stitch in time. l The grass is always greener. l Money doesn't make the world go round. The wisdom of the ages is so dinned into us, we now think of it as cliched. Yet these hard-won lessons have shaped people and societies, helping us navigate a shifting world and our changing roles within it. What is wisdom? Literally, it is a state of knowing (from the Proto-Germanic wis, "to see" or "to know", and the suffix -dom, denoting a state or condition). As Socrates put it, in the 5th century BCE, it is also crucially the state of knowing what one doesn't know. As for what makes a person wise, this is where it gets interesting. A large-scale study conducted across 2,600 p...