"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late"
About this Quote
Frankfurter’s line lands like a rebuke to the American addiction to punctual certainty. A judge - and a Supreme Court justice at that - is supposed to prize timeliness: deadlines, finality, the clean snap of a decision. Instead, he argues for an almost embarrassing patience with truth. Wisdom, he implies, is not a merit badge earned on schedule but a visitor that shows up when it pleases. The provocation is in the “too often”: he’s admitting the bleak possibility that wisdom may never arrive at all. That’s not sentimental; it’s a sober accounting of human limits.
The subtext is institutional. Courts are built to close questions, yet constitutional judgment is full of belated realizations: a society discovers the cruelty of a precedent, the blindness of a consensus, the hidden costs of a tidy rule. Frankfurter was famously cautious, often urging judicial restraint and respect for democratic processes. Read that way, the quote doubles as a defense of delayed moral clarity: better to accept a late-arriving correction than to fossilize error out of pride, impatience, or the fear of looking inconsistent.
There’s also a personal ethic tucked inside the syntax. “Reject it merely because it comes late” targets a common vanity: preferring to be early over being right. Frankfurter blesses the revision, the changed mind, the late apology. In an arena where reversals are framed as weakness, he reframes them as maturity - and warns that the real failure is not lateness, but refusing the knock when wisdom finally comes calling.
The subtext is institutional. Courts are built to close questions, yet constitutional judgment is full of belated realizations: a society discovers the cruelty of a precedent, the blindness of a consensus, the hidden costs of a tidy rule. Frankfurter was famously cautious, often urging judicial restraint and respect for democratic processes. Read that way, the quote doubles as a defense of delayed moral clarity: better to accept a late-arriving correction than to fossilize error out of pride, impatience, or the fear of looking inconsistent.
There’s also a personal ethic tucked inside the syntax. “Reject it merely because it comes late” targets a common vanity: preferring to be early over being right. Frankfurter blesses the revision, the changed mind, the late apology. In an arena where reversals are framed as weakness, he reframes them as maturity - and warns that the real failure is not lateness, but refusing the knock when wisdom finally comes calling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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