Education Quote by Aphra Behn

The flex here is anti-flex: Behn conjures a figure stuffed with every bookish credential available, then punctures him with a single humiliating insight. “He that knew all that learning ever writ” sets up the old ideal of mastery - the scholar as vault, hoarding the written record of “learning.” The next beat yanks the rug: the only real knowledge is the admission of ignorance. That pivot lands because it’s not gentle humility; it’s a verdict on what counts as intelligence. Memorization and authority aren’t wisdom. Self-knowledge is.

In Behn’s moment, that stance is more pointed than it looks. Restoration England prized wit, classical reference, and the performance of erudition - especially in the theater, where audiences came ready to judge who sounded “learned.” Behn, a working dramatist and a woman in a profession that invited suspicion, weaponizes a familiar philosophical move (the Socratic “I know that I know nothing”) to undercut gatekeeping. If the man who has read everything is still ignorant, then the cultural monopoly of the credentialed is revealed as theater: an act, a costume, a script.

The line also carries a sly self-defense. Behn doesn’t have to out-cite the scholars; she reframes the contest. The smartest person in the room isn’t the one with the thickest bibliography, but the one alert to the limits of any bibliography. It’s a critique of intellectual vanity that doubles as an opening for outsiders: if certainty is the pose, doubt is the real sophistication.