The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Wisdom, on this view, is less about accumulating knowledge than about subtraction. The world offers far more detail, slights, opinions and possible worries than any mind can hold, so the wise person is the one who sorts well, letting the trivial pass and keeping attention for what matters. It is a skill of selection more than of intelligence.

The idea fits William James's psychology. In his work on the mind, he treated attention as a selective force: we do not take in everything, we shape our experience by what we notice and what we ignore. Seen this way, ignoring is not laziness but an essential part of thinking. It also suits his pragmatism, which judges ideas by their usefulness in actual life. A mind cluttered with every grievance and fact is poorly equipped to act.

A modern example is a person who gets a curt reply from a colleague, sees a stream of alarming headlines, and notices a minor flaw in their own work, all before lunch. The wise response is not to resolve each one but to ask which deserves real thought. They let the curt email go, skim the news once, and spend their energy on the project that counts.