Life & Wisdom Quote by Evan Esar

Hope, in Evan Esar's hands, isn’t a candle in the dark; it’s a cosmetic product. Calling it a "veneer" strips hope of its inspirational costume and recasts it as a thin, polished layer applied to something structurally unsound: "today's disappointment". The bite is in the material metaphor. Veneer suggests artifice, a surface fix meant to make the present bearable without changing it. You can hear the wry Midcentury American skepticism toward self-help optimism and advertiser cheer: the future as a showroom, the present as a workshop full of defects.

The line works because it compresses time into a transaction. "Tomorrow" becomes a sales pitch for enduring "today". Hope isn’t portrayed as delusion exactly, but as a coping mechanism that risks becoming a habit: postpone reckoning, keep moving, keep smiling. That postponement is the subtext. The quote isn’t attacking hope as much as interrogating the way we deploy it, especially when it functions like emotional credit - borrowing against a future that may never pay out.

Esar, a professional humorist, writes with a cynic’s economy. The sentence is clean, almost proverb-like, which is part of the trick: it resembles wisdom while smuggling in a jab. It's not a grand philosophy of despair; it's a small, sharp warning about how easily "looking ahead" can become a refusal to look around.