If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Wisdom Quotes
“All I know is that I know nothing” is flagged as misattributed to Socrates. The nearest thing in Plato is the end of Book I of the Republic, where Socrates concludes that he knows nothing about what justice is. That is a narrower claim than the slogan, and part of an argument rather than a statement about himself.
Most of the entries here come from poets and playwrights, with Shakespeare, Edward Young and Pope at the top, which fits: wisdom is rarely stated in a sentence of its own, more often spoken by a character or tucked into a couplet. For the sourced ones, William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890): “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” Or Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'
Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.’
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Experience is the only source of wisdom: by which I mean, the competent conduct of life.
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.