My answer to that question changed after reading an outstanding essay by Paul Graham titled “Is it Worth being Wise?”.
Most people say that wisdom is something that comes from experiences while intelligence is something innate. This explanation is partially true, but it does not tell the whole story.
According to Graham ““Wise” and “smart” are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that “wise” means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and “smart” means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.”
Another interesting point is related to the fact that knowledge is being fractioned as our society evolves. If on ancient times one could be wise and smart contemporaneously, nowadays people are facing the need to choose between wisdom and intelligence (quite counter-intuitive right?).
Anyway, you can make your own conclusions by reading the paper here.
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