Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Self-knowledge, Priestley suggests, is an acid that dissolves our favorite social poses: hero worship and sneering alike. The line works because it refuses the easy moral posture of the observer. If you have taken a clear look at your own compromises, vanities, and cowardices, it becomes harder to keep other people pinned to the wall as saints or fools. Admiration and contempt are both ways of staying comfortably above the mess, and Priestley is arguing for a more honest altitude: eye level.

The subtext is quietly devastating. “What I have known” isn’t “what I have done,” but what he has learned about his motives - the backstage mechanics of being a person. That distinction matters. Priestley isn’t pleading for forgiveness; he’s describing a recalibration of judgment. Once you understand how often you act from mixed motives, you stop mistaking other people’s performances for their essence. You also stop flattering yourself with the idea that you, uniquely, see clearly.

Contextually, this lands with particular force in a 20th-century British writer who watched collective confidence shatter and reassemble through war, class strain, and political rhetoric. Priestley was interested in the moral weather of ordinary life, not just grand villains and heroes. The sentence reads like a small antidote to the era’s appetite for absolutes: a call to replace the thrill of certainty with the harder discipline of humility. Not niceness - accuracy.