"Wise it is to comprehend the whole"
About this Quote
“Wise it is to comprehend the whole” lands with the clipped authority of a maxim, the kind that sounds like it was carved into stone and then quietly dares you to live up to it. Young, a poet-priest writing in an age obsessed with moral accounting and cosmic order, isn’t praising trivia-level knowledge. He’s arguing for total perspective: the ability to see parts as parts, to resist the seductive comfort of the fragment.
The line’s syntax does half the work. By leading with “Wise,” Young makes wisdom the standard and comprehension the price of admission. “Comprehend” carries a double charge: to understand, yes, but also to contain, to take in. That second meaning matters in a period when “the whole” could mean God’s design, the social hierarchy, the arc of a life from birth to judgment. Young’s world assumed that reality was legible if you were disciplined enough (morally and intellectually) to read it.
The subtext is a warning against partial vision: the expert who knows a slice but mistakes it for the loaf; the partisan who clings to a fact as if it were a fate; the anxious mind that zooms in on immediate pain and loses the longer story. Young is pushing a kind of spiritual systems thinking before the term existed. It’s also an implicit critique of vanity. If you can’t “comprehend the whole,” you don’t get to claim the mantle of the wise; you’re just informed, or clever, or busy.
In a culture flooded with takes, the line still stings: wisdom isn’t speed. It’s scale.
The line’s syntax does half the work. By leading with “Wise,” Young makes wisdom the standard and comprehension the price of admission. “Comprehend” carries a double charge: to understand, yes, but also to contain, to take in. That second meaning matters in a period when “the whole” could mean God’s design, the social hierarchy, the arc of a life from birth to judgment. Young’s world assumed that reality was legible if you were disciplined enough (morally and intellectually) to read it.
The subtext is a warning against partial vision: the expert who knows a slice but mistakes it for the loaf; the partisan who clings to a fact as if it were a fate; the anxious mind that zooms in on immediate pain and loses the longer story. Young is pushing a kind of spiritual systems thinking before the term existed. It’s also an implicit critique of vanity. If you can’t “comprehend the whole,” you don’t get to claim the mantle of the wise; you’re just informed, or clever, or busy.
In a culture flooded with takes, the line still stings: wisdom isn’t speed. It’s scale.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Edward
Add to List
