Wisdom Cryptograms

Quotes about wisdom, encoded as substitution ciphers and laid out for paper — big type, a blank under every letter, answers on their own page.

Twenty-six quotations that all turn on the same thing: knowing, or the limits of knowing. Emerson on the forest inside an acorn, Wilde on temptation and on the useful uses of experience, Lincoln, Brontë, Thoreau, and a half-dozen proverbs. Grouping them by subject rather than by author means the sheets read as an argument between people who never met, which is a different pleasure from working through one writer's collected lines.

Difficulty is deliberately mixed here — three easy, thirteen middling, seven hard and three at the top of the range — because the subject, not the challenge, is what holds the set together. Sheets are ordered shortest first, so each one starts gently and closes on the longest quotation in that batch.

The set to reach for when the point of the afternoon is the quotations rather than the code. Works well read aloud from the answer page afterwards, which is the only time we would suggest reading the answers at all.

This section: 26 quotations, written between 1546 and 1903, 41 to 80 letters long, graded easy / medium / hard / expert. Voices you will meet: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Helen Keller and 7 more.

The 5 sheets

• Set 1

  6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert

• Set 2

  5 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert

• Set 3

  5 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Expert

• Set 4

  5 puzzles · Medium, Hard

• Set 5

  5 puzzles · Easy, Medium

Every sheet prints on US Letter with half-inch margins, gives you a blank line under each cipher letter, and keeps the answer key on its own page so nothing is spoiled while you work.