We are wiser than we know.

The line expresses a characteristic Emersonian faith in the mind’s latent powers: beneath our conscious, articulate knowledge lies a deeper intelligence—intuition, moral sense, and imaginative insight—that often guides us before we can explain it. Read this way, the remark aligns with Transcendentalist ideas about self-reliance and the “inner light”: people habitually underestimate their own capacity for judgment and understanding because they look outward for authority or demand explicit proof before trusting what they already, in some sense, grasp. The aphorism also hints at the gap between lived experience and verbalized knowledge—suggesting that wisdom can be tacit, embodied, or only gradually brought to awareness.