Creativity Quote by Paul Simon

Even when the world is handing you the truth in plain language, you can still duck it with a smile. Paul Simon’s line lands because it’s not moralizing about deception; it’s diagnosing a listener’s complicity. “All lies and jests” suggests the noise floor of modern life: half-serious banter, polite fictions, entertainment that doubles as cover. The sting is that none of it really matters, because the filter is internal. You don’t get fooled so much as you volunteer to be.

Written into “The Boxer,” this feels less like a grand statement about society than a bruised self-portrait. The song’s narrator is a drifter and striver, someone collecting small humiliations and half-wins, and the lyric captures a survival tactic: selective hearing as emotional self-defense. When life is unstable, hearing only what confirms your next step can look like resilience. It can also be denial with good posture.

The subtext is that communication isn’t failing because messages are unclear; it’s failing because clarity threatens the stories we need to keep functioning. “Disregards the rest” is the quietest phrase here, and the cruelest: it implies waste, a whole remainder of reality left on the table. Simon’s genius is that he makes this cognitive bias sound like folk wisdom, hummable and intimate, so you recognize yourself before you can object.