“No man knows what he can do until he tries.”

— Carter G. Woodson, book The Mis-Education of the Negro

Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro

Last update April 7, 2026. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "No man knows what he can do until he tries." by Carter G. Woodson?

Carter G. Woodson15

African-American historian and writer 1875–1950

Related quotes

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Self-Reliance

“No one knows what he can do till he tries.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 786
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

“A man never knows what a fool he is until he hears himself imitated by one.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) English actor and theatre manager

Quoted by Max Beerbohm in Hebert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art Collected by Max Beerbohm http://books.google.com/books?id=wM08AAAAIAAJ&q=&quot;A+man+never+knows+what+a+fool+he+is+until+he+hears+himself+imitated+by+one&quot;&pg=PA312#v=onepage (1920).

“Lastly, what is history for? This is perhaps a harder question than the others; a man who answers it will have to reflect rather more widely than a man who answers the three we have answered already. He must reflect not only on historical thinking but on other things as well, because to say that something is `for' something implies a distinction between A and B, where A is good for something and B is that for which something is good. But I will suggest an answer, and express the opinion that no historian would reject it, although the further questions to which it gives rise are numerous and difficult.
My answer is that history is `for' human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 10

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. Einstein paraphrasing Schopenhauer. Reportedly from On The Freedom Of The Will (1839), as translated in The Philosophy of American History: The Historical Field Theory (1945) by Morris Zucker, p. 531 Variant translations: Man can do what he wants but he cannot want what he wants. As quoted in The Motivated Brain: A Neurophysiological Analysis of Human Behavior (1991) by Pavel Vasilʹevich Simonov, p. 198 We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. As quoted by Einstein in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929) p. 17. A scan of the article is available online here http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/what_life_means_to_einstein.pdf (see p. 114). Attributed Source: Essays and Aphorisms