Life & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

Moore lands the sentence like a paradox you can’t quite wriggle free from: ignorance can be safer than expertise, and expertise is rarely as objective as it advertises. The first clause flatters the humble stance - if you don’t have the lived experience to judge, you’re less likely to commit the big, swaggering mistake of pretending you do. But Moore doesn’t let humility become virtue-signaling. She pivots: even when you can appraise, the real payoff of appraisal is that it exposes the appraiser.

That turn is classic Moore: disciplined skepticism dressed in immaculate syntax. “Appraise” is a cool, market-adjacent verb, suggesting valuation, taste-making, cultural gatekeeping. By repeating it, she makes evaluation feel procedural, almost bureaucratic, then quietly reveals its bias. Judgment is not a window onto the thing judged; it’s a mirror held up to the judge’s habits, loyalties, and blind spots.

The subtext has teeth in a literary culture where critics, patrons, and institutions declare what counts as “good” art. Moore, a poet who built authority through precision rather than confessional grandstanding, distrusts the easy prestige of verdicts. Experience isn’t dismissed - it’s demoted from trump card to data point. The line reads like an ethical warning against overreach and a sly critique of cultural confidence: the most revealing thing about your critique may be you - your appetite for certainty, your need to rank, your fear of being wrong. In a world addicted to takes, Moore offers a bracing diagnostic: your opinion is evidence, just not always about the subject.