Wit & Attitude Quote by King Solomon

Authority speaks here with the calm, unarguable certainty of a throne, and that is exactly the point. Attributed to King Solomon, the line doesn’t merely recommend piety as a private virtue; it installs reverence as the entry ticket to knowledge itself. “Start with God” is an ordering principle: before you ask what the world is, you accept who gets to define it. Learning becomes less a free-ranging hunt for truth than a disciplined posture, literally “bowing down,” where humility is framed not as a mindset but as a bodily, political act.

The subtext is governance. Solomon’s wisdom tradition (Proverbs’ “fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”) binds intellectual legitimacy to religious loyalty, a move that stabilizes a society by making skepticism look like arrogance and arrogance look like stupidity. Notice the social pressure built into the insult: “only fools” creates a moral hierarchy in which dissent isn’t just wrong, it’s childish and disrespectful. “Thumb their noses” turns doubt into a sneer, making the skeptic seem less like a thinker and more like a delinquent.

Context matters: an ancient monarchy needs cohesion, and cohesion needs a shared sacred frame. If God is the first premise, then law, kingship, and wisdom inherit divine backing. The quote’s rhetorical power lies in how it collapses epistemology into obedience: to learn is to submit, and to submit is to belong.