Quote by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: “I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.”

Most people think learning is about accumulating knowledge and becoming more impressive. But real intellectual humility means recognizing how vast our ignorance is. Learning shrinks that ignorance — it doesn't crown you with certainty, it shows you how much more there is to understand.

Sor Juana wrote during the height of colonial New Spain, when women were barred from universities and intellectual life was tightly controlled by the Catholic Church. Her 1690 Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz defended a woman's right to study and reason in a society that considered female intellectualism dangerous.

Mexican poet, philosopher, and nun of the colonial era, considered the first published feminist writer of the Americas. Her poetry, plays, and essays challenged the intellectual and social restrictions placed on women in seventeenth-century New Spain with extraordinary courage.