"The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things"
About this Quote
Wisdom shows itself not in hoarding facts but in ranking what matters. To know the relative value of things is to judge where to spend attention, time, loyalty, and sacrifice. Life forces trade-offs: every yes is a no to something else. The wise person understands opportunity cost, sees through surface glitter, and keeps the higher goods from being crowded out by the urgent but trivial.
This is not a call to relativism, where all values float untethered, but to proportion. Some goods are real and enduring, others are instruments or distractions. Comfort can be pleasant, but integrity outranks it. Efficiency can be useful, but it must serve humane ends. Price and value often diverge; the market is noisy, and so is public opinion. Wisdom filters the noise, assigning proper weight to things according to a coherent scale of ends.
Dean Inge, the Anglican cleric dubbed the Gloomy Dean, wrote through the upheavals of early 20th-century modernity, when old hierarchies of meaning were faltering. His aphorism distills a classical insight, echoing Aristotle’s phronesis and the Stoic emphasis on distinguishing what is up to us and what is not. To keep an ordered soul in a disordered age requires a practiced sense of proportion: the foresight to prefer long-term goods over quick gratification, the courage to accept losses in lesser things for the sake of greater ones, and the humility to revise priorities when reality teaches.
Practically, this skill looks like choosing time with a dying friend over email, declining a profitable deal that compromises trust, or investing in craft over publicity. It also means perceiving hidden costs: that perpetual busyness devalues reflection, that cynicism corrodes joy, that convenience purchased by exploitation is too expensive. Mortality sharpens the calculus. With limited days, the currency of life is spent whether we notice or not. Wisdom is the art of spending it where it buys what ultimately endures.
This is not a call to relativism, where all values float untethered, but to proportion. Some goods are real and enduring, others are instruments or distractions. Comfort can be pleasant, but integrity outranks it. Efficiency can be useful, but it must serve humane ends. Price and value often diverge; the market is noisy, and so is public opinion. Wisdom filters the noise, assigning proper weight to things according to a coherent scale of ends.
Dean Inge, the Anglican cleric dubbed the Gloomy Dean, wrote through the upheavals of early 20th-century modernity, when old hierarchies of meaning were faltering. His aphorism distills a classical insight, echoing Aristotle’s phronesis and the Stoic emphasis on distinguishing what is up to us and what is not. To keep an ordered soul in a disordered age requires a practiced sense of proportion: the foresight to prefer long-term goods over quick gratification, the courage to accept losses in lesser things for the sake of greater ones, and the humility to revise priorities when reality teaches.
Practically, this skill looks like choosing time with a dying friend over email, declining a profitable deal that compromises trust, or investing in craft over publicity. It also means perceiving hidden costs: that perpetual busyness devalues reflection, that cynicism corrodes joy, that convenience purchased by exploitation is too expensive. Mortality sharpens the calculus. With limited days, the currency of life is spent whether we notice or not. Wisdom is the art of spending it where it buys what ultimately endures.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Dean
Add to List
