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.”