Marriage Quote by Thomas Fuller

Domestic life is where Fuller’s piety turns cagey. “He knows little, who will tell his wife all he knows” isn’t really an insult to women so much as a celebration of male discretion as wisdom: the man who blurts everything at home reveals, by Fuller’s logic, that he doesn’t understand power. Knowledge here is less about facts than about social navigation - who gets access, when, and at what cost.

Fuller, a 17th-century English clergyman writing in a world of civil war, religious faction, and precarious patronage, would have seen words as liabilities. Speech could be evidence. A careless remark could travel from hearth to parish to courthouse. The line flatters silence as a kind of intelligence because survival in that culture often depended on managing information, not sharing it.

The subtext is harsher: marriage is framed not as a partnership of equals but as a potential leak in the male public self. The wife becomes the nearest, most intimate “other” - trusted enough to be dangerous. Fuller is encoding a gendered script in which a man’s interior life remains sovereign territory, and a woman’s proximity is treated as an unavoidable risk to be managed.

It also works because it’s built like a proverb: short, paradoxical, and smugly self-sealing. If you object, you’ve already proven you “know little.” The wit is the trap. Fuller offers a moral lesson that doubles as social advice: keep your counsel, even - especially - from the person closest to you.