“The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 532.
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Nathaniel Emmons 5
American clergy 1745–1840Related quotes
“Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.”
Stanza 124
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886)
“The wisest man is he who is certain he is not.”
Le plus sage est celui qui ne pense point l'être.
Satire 4
Satires (1716)
Book XXIX, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)
O degli uomini inferma e instabil mente!
Come siàn presti a variar disegno!
Tutti i pensier mutamo facilmente,
Più quei che nascon d’amoroso sdegno.
Canto XXIX, stanza 1 (tr. J. Hoole)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“And he is oft the wisest man
Who is not wise at all.”
The Oak and the Broom.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: A Dream of John Ball (1886), Ch. 4: The Voice of John Ball
Context: Forsooth, he that waketh in hell and feeleth his heart fail him, shall have memory of the merry days of earth, and how that when his heart failed him there, he cried on his fellow, were it his wife or his son or his brother or his gossip or his brother sworn in arms, and how that his fellow heard him and came and they mourned together under the sun, till again they laughed together and were but half sorry between them. This shall he think on in hell, and cry on his fellow to help him, and shall find that therein is no help because there is no fellowship, but every man for himself.
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.