Life & Wisdom Quote by Stuart Chase

Chase is pushing back against a seductive 20th-century idea: that language is basically empty until we fill it with context. He “tries” to accept it, but the line admits defeat with a kind of disciplined honesty. The phrase “hard as I try” isn’t just personal; it’s a portrait of an era wrestling with semantic theory, propaganda, and the new sciences of persuasion. When politics and advertising learn to weaponize phrasing, it becomes fashionable to say meaning is purely relational, purely situational, endlessly malleable. Chase hears the sophistication in that claim and still can’t swallow it.

The intent is conservative in the best sense: to defend the stubborn residue of meaning that clings to words even when we attempt to deconstruct them. “Words have no meaning in themselves” is presented as a proposition he’s been asked to adopt, almost like an intellectual diet. His refusal is not reactionary; it’s psychological. “Habits of a lifetime” names the hidden infrastructure under every theory of language: the lived experience that trains us to expect words to carry weight, to point, to commit. He’s reminding fellow writers and readers that communication relies on that expectation. If words are only vibes and context, accountability gets slippery fast.

The subtext is a warning about fashionable relativism. Chase isn’t denying nuance; he’s denying the fantasy that meaning can be endlessly postponed without social cost. The sentence works because it frames epistemology as character: what you can’t unlearn is as important as what you can.