Consider the following comments on wisdom.
Wisdom is mostly the slow art of regretting what cleverness once made us proud of.
Knowledge collects answers, wisdom learns which questions to stop asking.
We grow wiser not by living longer but by paying attention to what the years keep repeating.
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Socrates
Much of what we call wisdom is simply the courage to admit how little we control.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge but a change in how we hold it, a humility that often arrives only after cleverness has failed us. Open with a remembered moment, perhaps a confident judgement that proved wrong, or an old person whose few words carried more weight than all our reading. Then explore the tension between wisdom as something taught, passed down in maxims and rules, and wisdom as something that can only be earned, painfully, through the experience the maxims try to summarise. A useful structural move contrasts the certainty of being clever, which we tend to enjoy young, against the comfort with uncertainty that seems to come, if it comes at all, with age. Caution: avoid the flattering conclusion that we are now wise, since the surest sign of wisdom may be the suspicion that we are still missing most of it.