“"I knew that before you were born." Let him who would instruct a wiser man consider this as said to himself.”

— Phaedrus , book Fables

Book V, fable 9, line 4.
Fables

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote ""I knew that before you were born." Let him who would instruct a wiser man consider this as said to himself." by Phaedrus?

Phaedrus 16

Latin fabulist and probably a Thracian slave -20

Related quotes

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Cat's Cradle

Chapter 124 http://books.google.com/books?id=61W3aGvTVgIC&q=%22Beware+of+the+man+who+works+hard+to+learn+something+learns+it+and+finds+himself+no+wiser+than+before%22&pg=PA281#v=onepage: Frank's Ant Farm
Cat's Cradle (1963)

“Give me a man who is man enough to give himself just to the woman who is worth him. If that woman were me, I would love him alone and forever”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

“O be wiser, thou !
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Lines (1795)
Context: If Thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature's works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.

“It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

5
tr. George Long (1888)
The Enchiridion (c. 135)

“He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)
Context: Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.