It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects the confidence and perceived omniscience of adolescence.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote highlights the often exaggerated self-assurance and belief in one's knowledge that comes with being seventeen. It points out the irony of youth, suggesting that while teenagers may feel invincible and all-knowing, true wisdom often comes with age and experience.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the idealism of youth.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?
Never assume that simply having a gun makes you a marksman. You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.
Judge not for your flaws, but for your Triumphs!
How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me 'understand' something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.
I remember when people used to think I was smart. I remember when people used to think my brain was useful. Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.
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