Wit & Attitude Quote by Earl Derr Biggers

A neat little insult disguised as folk wisdom, Biggers' line turns human fallibility into something as ordinary as footwear. "Every man" is doing a lot of work here: it flattens class, education, and self-image into the same embarrassing baseline. No one gets to skip the apprenticeship of bad judgment. You can be refined, talented, even lucky, and still end up clomping around in "fools shoes" for a while.

The genius is the verb: "wear out". Failing once isn't the point; repeating the mistake until the leather gives is. Biggers suggests that foolishness isn't a single lapse but a phase you inhabit, a costume you commit to long enough that it becomes uncomfortable, then untenable, then finally unusable. Experience, in this framing, isn't a noble climb toward wisdom so much as abrasion: you rub against consequences until the lesson takes.

There's also a sly moral economy embedded in "at least one pair". It implies a minimum requirement, not a maximum. Some people, the line hints, keep buying replacements. That undercurrent of cynicism tracks with a novelist's eye for character: people don't change because they're told to; they change because the old version of themselves gets too expensive to maintain.

In early 20th-century America - a culture selling self-improvement while enduring booms, busts, and reinvention - the quote reads like a corrective to optimism. Progress isn't proof of virtue; it's often just the aftermath of finally outgrowing your most persuasive delusions.