Wit and wisdom are born with a man.

Selden’s remark asserts an essentially innate view of intellectual gifts: “wit” (quickness, verbal ingenuity) and “wisdom” (sound judgment) are presented as qualities one is born with rather than chiefly acquired through schooling or experience. Read this way, the line pushes back against the early-modern faith in education, training, and cultivation as the primary makers of a person’s mind. It also implies a limit to self-fashioning: learning may refine or furnish the mind, but it cannot manufacture the core capacities that make someone truly witty or wise. The aphorism’s bluntness is part of its force—compressing a debate about nature versus nurture into a memorable, skeptical maxim.