Xenophon

Socrates did not have the weakness of many scholars, the desire to know about all possible things, to learn the origins and explanations of things - what the Sophists call “the nature of things” - and to uncover the origins of the celestial bodies. Socrates said, “Is it true that people are so concerned with these earthly things? People wrongly think that they should know everything. They think that they can despise the most necessary and important fields of knowledge, and penetrate the mysteries that do not belong to us.”

Socrates thought that stupidity was incompatible with wisdom, but he never said that ignorance was stupidity.

Socrates told his students that in good systems of education, there is a certain limit you should not go beyond. In geometry, he said, it is enough to know how to measure the land when you want to sell it or buy it, or how to share an inheritance, or to divide work among workers. He did not like too many sophisticated sciences; though he knew all of them. He said that sophisticated knowledge requires an extra effort that takes the student’s time from the most basic and the most important human pursuit: moral perfection.