I get the distinction. But, the world has changed 100 times since the first words were coined around 1000 BCE. The second adage is recent but was coined based on the 3000-year-old observation. The modern person really doesn't view things in the same light. Perspectives are different. Knowledge is power. Knowledge gets you a job you wouldn't otherwise have. Knowledge allows for promotions and prestige, respect and trust. There's no difference between the smart man and the wise man because a prudent person will gain more knowledge in one of 10,000 different possible fields of interest in order to make his or her life better. Companies offer training sessions for everything under the sun and give endorsements, licenses, certifications, and certificates for those sessions. Universities offer a whole host of formal trainings from A.A. to M.D.
Yeah, it's a different world. Wise and smart are distinctions from the east, not from the west. Westerners draw their boundaries differently. The age of scientific inquiry is for everyone, and everyone participates in order to get ahead. And in the really, really modern world, formal training is not the end. The internet makes it possible to find out about any tidbit of knowledge that has been written about anywhere in the world in any language of the world. Learning never has to end and it is always current.
While it might be interesting to see how the ancient world made its distinctions in society, those distinctions have morphed into a seamless world, no such boundaries still exist. Having knowledge and being smart are equivalent phrases, but so are having knowledge and being prudent or judicious. As for me, I would rather live in a seamless world and appreciate the knowledge of an ancient culture for what it meant to them than to try to apply a 3000-year-old axiom to a modern world where the paradigm is so different that people no longer understand the old one without help.
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