Education Quote by George Burns

George Burns knew that the gag isn’t the punchline; it’s the timing. “Be quick to learn and wise to know” reads like a tidy piece of self-help, but coming from a comedian who survived vaudeville, radio, film, and late-night reinvention, it’s really a survival manual for staying relevant without becoming a zealot.

The first half, “quick to learn,” flatters the hustler’s instinct: keep your antenna up, steal the good tricks, adapt before the room changes. It’s the ethos of show business and modern life alike, where trends move faster than taste and careers are built on flexibility. Burns isn’t romanticizing knowledge; he’s talking about reflexes.

Then he swerves: “wise to know.” Not “quick to know,” not “eager to know,” but wise - implying restraint, selection, and humility. The subtext is that information is cheap, but judgment is expensive. In comedy, mistaking loud certainty for insight is how you bomb. In culture, it’s how you turn into the person who has an opinion about everything and understanding of nothing.

The line also smuggles in Burns’ signature skepticism. Learning is speed; knowing is responsibility. Being “wise to know” suggests an awareness of what you don’t need to chase: every argument, every headline, every fashionable certainty. It’s a compact defense against the age-old trap of cleverness - mistaking mental motion for progress. Burns, the centenarian wit, is effectively saying: keep up, but don’t get carried away.