Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“I am not young enough to know everything.”
- Source
- The Admirable Crichton
- Date
- 1902
Meaning of “I am not young enough to know everything.”
Barrie reverses the cliché that age brings complete wisdom, making youthful certainty—not age—the comic claim to omniscience.
Where does it come from?
The Admirable Crichton, Act I, Project Gutenberg #3490. Ernest Woolley repeatedly delivers “I am not young enough to know everything” as a self-consciously clever epigram while Agatha, Treherne and the others struggle to understand it; Crichton later says he has no idea what Ernest meant. It remains fictional comic dialogue rather than J. M. Barrie autobiography or a factual claim about age and knowledge.
