"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience"
About this Quote
Wisdom grows not from the sheer number of things that happen to a person, but from the ability to absorb, interpret, and be transformed by what happens. Experience is raw material; capacity for experience is the readiness to notice, to question, to feel, to connect patterns, and to revise one’s beliefs. Without that inner elasticity, events pile up like unread books on a shelf. With it, even a few encounters can reshape a life.
Shaw puts his finger on a common confusion: age, travel, or hardship are often mistaken for wisdom. Yet the older person can be brittle, the traveler incurious, the survivor embittered. Another person, younger or less traveled, can be deeply receptive, attentive to nuance, humble before complexity, and thus wiser. The distinction is not quantity but permeability. Capacity for experience includes curiosity, empathy, imagination, and the courage to let facts disturb one’s comfort.
The line comes from Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists, appended to Man and Superman (1903), a collection of sharp aphorisms that challenge lazy assumptions. It aligns with his larger faith in creative evolution and the Life Force: progress depends on energetic, adaptive minds rather than on accumulated custom. For Shaw, vitality and openness are engines of growth; convention and complacency are its brakes.
The idea echoes modern psychology. Openness to experience correlates with intellectual humility and integrative thinking; metacognition and reflection turn episodes into learning; a growth mindset keeps the mind plastic rather than petrified. Two people may live through the same event; one extracts principles, tests them, and changes habits, while the other rehearses a grievance and learns nothing new.
The practical moral is less about collecting experiences and more about cultivating the capacity to be taught by them: paying attention, seeking disconfirming evidence, entering other perspectives, and allowing oneself to be changed. Wisdom, then, is not a ledger but a lens.
Shaw puts his finger on a common confusion: age, travel, or hardship are often mistaken for wisdom. Yet the older person can be brittle, the traveler incurious, the survivor embittered. Another person, younger or less traveled, can be deeply receptive, attentive to nuance, humble before complexity, and thus wiser. The distinction is not quantity but permeability. Capacity for experience includes curiosity, empathy, imagination, and the courage to let facts disturb one’s comfort.
The line comes from Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists, appended to Man and Superman (1903), a collection of sharp aphorisms that challenge lazy assumptions. It aligns with his larger faith in creative evolution and the Life Force: progress depends on energetic, adaptive minds rather than on accumulated custom. For Shaw, vitality and openness are engines of growth; convention and complacency are its brakes.
The idea echoes modern psychology. Openness to experience correlates with intellectual humility and integrative thinking; metacognition and reflection turn episodes into learning; a growth mindset keeps the mind plastic rather than petrified. Two people may live through the same event; one extracts principles, tests them, and changes habits, while the other rehearses a grievance and learns nothing new.
The practical moral is less about collecting experiences and more about cultivating the capacity to be taught by them: paying attention, seeking disconfirming evidence, entering other perspectives, and allowing oneself to be changed. Wisdom, then, is not a ledger but a lens.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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