Education Quote by Charles Morgan

Against the modern cliché that knowledge kills mystery, Morgan flips the charge: the more you learn, the less smug your certainty becomes. "As knowledge increases, wonder deepens" is built like a quiet rebuttal to the debunking impulse - the idea that naming a thing drains it of meaning. Morgan, a novelist who wrote in an era shadowed by world wars and accelerated by science, is arguing for a different kind of intellectual maturity: understanding as an enlarging force, not a closing one.

The line works because of its grammar. "Increases" suggests accumulation, the steady stacking of facts; "deepens" signals vertical motion, a plunge. He links the quantitative to the qualitative, implying that real knowledge isn't trivia or mere mastery but a widening of perception that makes the world feel stranger in the best way. There's subtextual modesty here, too: wonder deepens when you recognize how much remains unsolved, how any clear answer opens onto more intricate questions. That's not anti-rational romance; it's the emotional payoff of serious attention.

In Morgan's context - early 20th-century literary culture negotiating between faith, modernism, and scientific authority - wonder becomes a kind of ethical stance. It's a check on dogmatism, whether religious or technocratic. The intent isn't to sentimentalize awe; it's to defend curiosity as a disciplined, adult feeling that survives contact with facts.