"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it"
About this Quote
Carroll turns moral certainty into a scavenger hunt, and that’s the point. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” reads like a Victorian schoolroom platitude until you hear the sly click underneath: the moral isn’t an intrinsic property of a story or event; it’s something a reader can force into existence with enough determination. The line flatters our interpretive instincts while quietly mocking them.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “morals” are often retrofitted onto nonsense, a parody of the era’s didactic children’s literature where every tale dutifully marched toward a lesson. Carroll, a mathematician with a taste for logical games, understood how easily reasoning can be reverse-engineered. Start with the conclusion you want, and you can backfill the “moral” like a proof written after the fact. The phrase “if only you can find it” is the tell: morality becomes a matter of technique, not truth.
The subtext is a warning about the human appetite for meaning. We are uncomfortable with randomness, so we moralize it; we turn accidents into parables, suffering into instruction, other people’s choices into cautionary tales. Carroll’s wit is that he doesn’t deny morals outright. He suggests they’re less like buried treasure and more like contraband you smuggle into the text.
Read today, it lands as an early critique of hot-take culture and overinterpretation: the confidence that any moment, meme, or misstep can be made to “teach” something, provided you’re clever enough to extract (or impose) the lesson.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “morals” are often retrofitted onto nonsense, a parody of the era’s didactic children’s literature where every tale dutifully marched toward a lesson. Carroll, a mathematician with a taste for logical games, understood how easily reasoning can be reverse-engineered. Start with the conclusion you want, and you can backfill the “moral” like a proof written after the fact. The phrase “if only you can find it” is the tell: morality becomes a matter of technique, not truth.
The subtext is a warning about the human appetite for meaning. We are uncomfortable with randomness, so we moralize it; we turn accidents into parables, suffering into instruction, other people’s choices into cautionary tales. Carroll’s wit is that he doesn’t deny morals outright. He suggests they’re less like buried treasure and more like contraband you smuggle into the text.
Read today, it lands as an early critique of hot-take culture and overinterpretation: the confidence that any moment, meme, or misstep can be made to “teach” something, provided you’re clever enough to extract (or impose) the lesson.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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