Daily Inspiration Quote by Roald Dahl

Dahl’s line smuggles a permission slip into a proverb: nonsense isn’t a guilty pleasure, it’s a mark of intelligence. The trick is the phrase “wisest men,” which he uses less as a demographic than as a cultural credential. Wisdom, in the respectable sense, is supposed to be controlled, optimizing, sober. Dahl flips that script. If the wise relish nonsense, then humor and absurdity aren’t childish detours from seriousness; they’re evidence that seriousness alone is a kind of stupidity.

The word “relished” matters. It’s sensory, even a little greedy, suggesting that nonsense isn’t merely tolerated as comic relief but actively craved. Dahl understood that the world kids inhabit is packed with rules that feel arbitrary, delivered by adults who rarely admit they’re improvising. Nonsense becomes a counter-language: it punctures pomposity, exposes the brittleness of authority, and gives readers a private thrill of revolt without requiring a manifesto.

Contextually, it sits neatly inside Dahl’s broader project: stories where the rational adult order is either incompetent or cruel, and the imaginative, the grotesque, the silly are tools of survival. This is not whimsy for whimsy’s sake; it’s a strategy. A little nonsense “now and then” is also a dosage claim, a wink at moderation that makes the statement socially acceptable while still endorsing mischief. Subtext: if you can’t laugh at the absurd, you’re not wise, you’re merely well-trained.