Education Quote by Norman Douglas

Wisdom gets demoted here from sacred prize to thrift-store assortment: “a collection of platitudes” is a jab that lands because it’s uncomfortably plausible. Norman Douglas isn’t denying that wise people exist; he’s puncturing the aura around “wisdom” as a category. The line compresses a whole skepticism about how societies package experience into tidy sentences, then treat the packaging as the product.

The wording does the work. “Save” carries a faintly biblical air, the sort of rhetorical flourish you’d expect in a moral maxim, and Douglas uses it to undercut moralizing itself. “Collection” suggests curation, even hoarding: wisdom isn’t discovery, it’s accumulation. “Platitudes” are the social currency of sounding insightful without risking specificity. Put together, the quote implies that what we call wisdom often functions less as truth than as a set of pre-approved sayings that keep conversation smooth and conflict contained.

The subtext is anti-heroic: wisdom isn’t a mountaintop revelation; it’s repetition, inheritance, and performance. That fits Douglas’s broader era and milieu: a late-Victorian/early-modernist writer’s impatience with piety, received ideas, and the self-seriousness of “high” moral talk. Modern life was getting faster, messier, less reverent; old certainties survived as slogans.

Douglas’s sting is also self-implicating. Writers trade in quotable lines, and the quote is itself dangerously close to a platitude about platitudes. That reflexive trap is part of the point: even cynicism can become a comforting script.