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The rate at which your knowledge will ripen into wisdom depends in considerable part upon your distinguishing what is important and what is relatively unimportant. Some people seem never to know any difference between the footnotes and the headlines.

— Benjamin Ide Wheeler

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More quotes by Benjamin Ide Wheeler

No single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon which European history built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life.

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If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Benjamin Ide Wheeler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.