This verse sits inside the lecture on wisdom handed down, Proverbs 4:1–9, in the grandfather's quoted speech.
Quick answer
Two commands, one urgency: acquire wisdom, acquire understanding, and do not drift from the words that point you to her.
Read the whole unit
The lecture on wisdom handed down is the only one where the father steps aside and lets an older voice speak. He begins by addressing his children, plural this time, and then reaches back a generation: when I was my father's son, tender and the only one in my mother's sight, he taught me too. From verse 4 the lecture becomes a quotation, and as the NKJV punctuates it, the grandfather's voice carries all the way through verse 9. So the son is hearing his grandfather through his father, and that is the lecture's real argument before it makes any other: this wisdom is not one man's opinion. It is an heirloom, tested across generations, handed down the way land or a name is handed down. What the heirloom says is startlingly single-minded. Get wisdom. The verb is the marketplace word for acquiring, and it hammers through the speech four times, joined by warmer verbs as the speech builds: do not forsake her, love her, exalt her, embrace her. Wisdom is spoken of as a bride to be cherished, not a course to be completed, and the promised return runs the same direction: she will preserve, keep, promote, honor, and finally crown. The lecture asks one generation's most valuable possession to become the next generation's first pursuit.
What this verse contributes
This verse introduces the lecture's drumbeat verb. "Get" is acquisition language, the word a man uses for buying a field, and the grandfather uses it without embarrassment: wisdom is obtained by people who go after her, not absorbed by people who stand near her. The two negatives complete the picture from the other side. Forgetting and turning away are how this inheritance is actually lost, not by rejection but by neglect, and the old man has lived long enough to know it.
Related: Proverbs 2:1–5 · James 1:5
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.