Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Frank Baum

Practicality, Baum suggests, is a fantasy we cling to when we are tired of getting hurt. The line snaps shut like a trap: it pretends to offer a fix (make hearts unbreakable) while quietly admitting the fix is impossible. That tension is the engine. In a culture that constantly markets “resilience” as a personal upgrade, Baum’s sentence reads like an early warning: your feelings aren’t malfunctioning because they cause pain; pain is evidence the heart is doing its job.

The subtext is less self-help than satire-by-fairytale. “Practical” is a word from ledgers and factories, a moral badge for people who want life to behave. Baum pushes it into the emotional realm and lets it fail there. The conditional clause (“until”) is doing heavy lifting: it implies we keep demanding efficiency from love, grief, longing, as if they should follow the same rules as tools. But tools don’t bond; they don’t risk; they don’t break. A heart that can’t break is also a heart that can’t truly commit.

Context matters because Baum is the Oz author, writing in an America sprinting into modernity - mass production, new consumer desires, a growing faith in systems. Oz often stages the contradiction between mechanical solutions and human need: the Tin Woodman’s missing heart, the Wizard’s cheap upgrades, the longing for a guarantee. This quote is Baum at his sharpest: he exposes the wish for emotional armor as a wish to opt out of being human, then makes that wish sound logical enough to indict us for wanting it.