Daily Inspiration Quote by Joyce Cary

Cary is taking a scalpel to pride disguised as certainty. The first clause frames ignorance not as a cute personal flaw but as a structural tragedy: you can’t inventory your own blind spots because the very tools you’d use to measure them are missing. That’s why the problem persists across classes and eras. Ignorance isn’t merely lack of information; it’s lack of self-awareness about the lack, which makes it uniquely resistant to correction.

Then comes the sharper, almost comic turn: “the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.” Cary isn’t arguing that knowledge automatically produces virtue. He’s pointing to a psychological inversion: confidence blooms in empty soil. The subtext is social as much as individual. People who know little often speak with maximal certainty because they haven’t yet encountered complexity, contradiction, or the humiliating experience of being wrong in precise ways. Meanwhile, the genuinely informed tend to hedge, not out of timidity, but because they can see the branching paths where an easy answer collapses.

As a novelist writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Cary is steeped in a world where ideology, propaganda, and “common sense” certainties were not parlor games but engines of policy and violence. His line reads like a warning about how societies get talked into disasters: not by the most informed, but by the most sure. The wit lands because it weaponizes a familiar human pattern, making arrogance look less like strength and more like a tell.