Education Quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Bulwer-Lytton frames humility not as a virtue you collect, but as the admission price for knowledge. The phrasing is stern, almost parental: "O be very sure" sounds like someone who has watched bright people fail for an unglamorous reason and is tired of repeating himself. He isn’t praising meekness; he’s warning against the particular arrogance that blocks learning: the assumption that intelligence is a finished product, that status equals insight, that being right once guarantees being right again.

The subtext is political as much as moral. As a Victorian statesman, Bulwer-Lytton lived inside institutions that rewarded performance of certainty: Parliament, party loyalty, class confidence. In that world, humility becomes a quietly subversive discipline. It asks the powerful to accept correction, the educated to risk looking ignorant, the ambitious to sit with uncertainty long enough to be changed by it. That’s a hard sell in any era; it’s especially pointed in a culture built on hierarchy.

The line also smuggles in a theory of learning: knowledge is not just accumulation, it’s transformation. "First will learn humility" suggests a sequence. Before facts, before rhetoric, before policy, you need the emotional posture that makes facts land and criticism stick. It works because it’s absolute to the point of provocation ("no man will learn anything at all"), daring the self-assured reader to prove it wrong, only to realize that the attempt requires the very humility being prescribed.