Education Quote by Paul Elmer More

More’s sentence is built like a moral trap: it begins in humility and ends in a chill. “Born knowing nothing” concedes the obvious, but the real move is the narrowing that follows - “with much striving we learn but a little.” The line isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-complacent. It punctures the modern faith that education, expertise, or earnest effort necessarily earns mastery. More, a critic associated with early 20th-century American humanism, writes against an age newly intoxicated by progress, professionalization, and the idea that systems can be engineered to suit us.

The subtext sharpens when he shifts from learning to law. “Bound by laws” doesn’t just mean statutes; it reads as the larger architecture of consequence: nature, morality, social order, even fate. The phrase “hearken to no plea of ignorance” is courtroom language, but he applies it to existence itself. Life is a strict liability regime. You don’t get a waiver because you didn’t know the terms.

What makes it work is the tonal discipline. “Rewards and punishments” sounds biblical, yet “calm indifference” strips away any comforting notion of a moral universe that cares about your intentions. It’s not warning us about a vengeful God; it’s warning us about impersonal reality. In an era of rising bureaucracy and scientific authority, More delivers a bracing correction: the world may be legible in fragments, but it remains relentlessly enforceable. The sentence is a compact argument for seriousness - not piety, not paranoia, just the adult recognition that consequences are often cleaner than our explanations.