"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience"
About this Quote
Shaw’s jab lands where Victorian self-help pieties go to die: experience doesn’t automatically improve you. The line is built like a trap for the complacent. Most people treat “I’ve been through a lot” as a résumé item, a moral credential. Shaw flips it. Wisdom isn’t a scrapbook of incidents; it’s the size and sensitivity of the instrument doing the receiving.
“Capacity for experience” is the key phrase, and it’s doing double duty. On the surface, it means openness: the ability to actually register what happens instead of sliding through life on preloaded scripts. Underneath, it’s a critique of social armor. Class, convention, and ego don’t just limit what you do; they limit what you’re allowed to feel and admit. You can have “experience” in the sense of events, travel, even hardship, and still be emotionally illiterate - protected by cliché, pride, or ideology. Shaw’s characters are full of that kind of “experienced” person: worldly, confident, and catastrophically unteachable.
Context matters: Shaw wrote in a culture obsessed with respectability and “character,” where age and suffering were routinely romanticized as proof of depth. As a dramatist and contrarian, he understood that people often go through events the way a tourist goes through a museum: they look, they move on, they miss the point. Wisdom, for Shaw, is not time served. It’s perceptual range - the willingness to be changed, to let reality revise you rather than flatter you.
“Capacity for experience” is the key phrase, and it’s doing double duty. On the surface, it means openness: the ability to actually register what happens instead of sliding through life on preloaded scripts. Underneath, it’s a critique of social armor. Class, convention, and ego don’t just limit what you do; they limit what you’re allowed to feel and admit. You can have “experience” in the sense of events, travel, even hardship, and still be emotionally illiterate - protected by cliché, pride, or ideology. Shaw’s characters are full of that kind of “experienced” person: worldly, confident, and catastrophically unteachable.
Context matters: Shaw wrote in a culture obsessed with respectability and “character,” where age and suffering were routinely romanticized as proof of depth. As a dramatist and contrarian, he understood that people often go through events the way a tourist goes through a museum: they look, they move on, they miss the point. Wisdom, for Shaw, is not time served. It’s perceptual range - the willingness to be changed, to let reality revise you rather than flatter you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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