Education Quote by John Cheever

Cheever tilts the word "wisdom" off its pedestal and lets it clatter into something darker: diagnosis instead of virtue. He’s not praising insight; he’s pointing at the bleak bargain that comes with it. The line slices the comforting myth that knowing better reliably leads to doing better. In Cheever’s moral universe, you can map good and evil with exquisite accuracy and still walk, politely and predictably, into the wrong room.

The construction does the heavy lifting. "Wisdom we know" narrows wisdom to the version we actually live with, not the Sunday-school ideal. Then he defines it as "knowledge of good and evil" - a biblical echo that matters because Eden’s fruit didn’t grant moral muscles; it granted moral consciousness. The sting is in the second half: "not the strength to choose". Cheever separates cognition from character, and he does it with the calm certainty of someone who has watched self-deception operate in well-lit kitchens and manicured suburbs.

Contextually, this is midcentury American fiction’s quiet indictment of respectability. Cheever wrote about commuters, cocktails, marriages that looked fine from the street - people fluent in the language of decency while privately staging small collapses. The subtext is merciless: our culture loves to reward intelligence, taste, even "awareness", as if these were proxies for ethics. Cheever refuses the substitution. Wisdom, in his telling, can be just another form of narration we use to explain ourselves while we fail, knowingly, to change.