Time & Perspective Quote by Herb Caen

Caen’s line works because it smuggles a hard truth inside a joke you can feel in your jaw. “Wisdom teeth” are nature’s late arrival, the evolutionary punchline: by the time they show up, you’re supposedly old enough to know better, yet they often cause the most trouble. He turns that biological nuisance into a moral calendar. Wisdom doesn’t arrive with birthdays or diplomas; it erupts the first time appetite outruns capacity.

The phrasing is all teeth and tempo. “Begins cutting” suggests both emergence and injury: wisdom is literally carved into you. The trigger isn’t contemplation but embarrassment, overcommitment, the social equivalent of trying to speak with your mouth too full. “Bites off more than he can chew” is a familiar idiom, but Caen refreshes it by making the punishment bodily, immediate, and faintly comic. You can hear the newsroom chuckle, then the wince.

As a journalist in mid-century San Francisco, Caen traded in aphorisms that could survive a column’s daily churn. The subtext is democratic and slightly cynical: nobody is exempt from self-inflicted lessons, and maturity is less enlightenment than damage control. It’s also a quiet jab at macho bravado and American overreach - the culturally admired habit of saying yes, going big, taking on one more thing. Caen implies that wisdom is reactive, not aspirational: you don’t gain it by wanting it, you earn it by choking a little on your own ambition.