I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort. From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be – what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing – I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am. We do not know – neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I– what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know. . Socrates
About This Quote

The quote above is a great example of one of the most well-known things in life. We often do not know what we do not know. In this case, the oracle is Socrates. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who was considered the wisest man in the known world.

Plato said that Socrates possessed [...] a sharp and penetrating intelligence, a keen understanding of everything, and an inexhaustible capacity for acquiring new knowledge: he always looked on himself as relatively ignorant and always desired to learn more and more about everything. (Plato) What separates Socrates from all other people is that he does not believe that he knows anything; instead, he simply knows that he does not know. He has no doubt that if he were to study something like philosophy, he would fail because all knowledge lies within his grasp but lies outside his grasp at the same time.

The god gives him this opportunity to test his limits; the god tests him daily to make sure that his limits are strong enough to allow him to learn new things and understand things better than others without giving up what he already knows. Socrates is just like all of us: we do not know what we do not know and we only believe we know something or we have some kind of experience when we actually just have no experience at all.

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More Quotes By Socrates
  1. Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
  2. Know thyself.
  3. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
  4. The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.
  5. The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
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