Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Moore Colby

Cleverness, in Colby’s telling, is a kind of emotional disability: the compulsion to resolve, categorize, and close the loop before you’ve even tasted the uncertainty. He flips the usual prestige ladder. “Clever people” aren’t heroes of reason; they’re impatience in a dinner jacket, people who confuse speed with wisdom and certainty with depth. The sly sting is in “seem not to feel”: he’s diagnosing a temperament, not merely scolding a habit. Bewilderment isn’t ignorance here; it’s a “natural pleasure,” a bodily appetite for complexity that modern life trains us to suppress.

The line works because it targets a familiar social performance. In classrooms, meetings, and salons, being the first to answer reads as competence, even virtue. Colby, an educator, is pushing against that incentive structure. The subtext is pedagogical: education shouldn’t be a factory for solutions but a cultivation of durable curiosity. His “chief relish of a life” phrase borrows the language of taste and appetite, implying that questioning is not homework, it’s cuisine. Answering too quickly becomes a kind of overeating: satisfying in the moment, dulling over time.

Contextually, you can hear an early-20th-century skepticism toward technocratic confidence and the era’s faith that expertise could mop up every mess. Colby warns that the pose of being “clever” can drain life’s richest feature: the ability to stay productively unsettled, to keep asking not because you lack answers, but because you refuse premature ones.