Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll lands the joke with the prim precision of a nursery rhyme and the bite of an adult confession. “I give myself very good advice” is a boast masquerading as self-care; it suggests an internal authority figure, the tidy Victorian voice that knows exactly what one ought to do. Then the second clause yanks the rug: “but I very seldom follow it.” The rhythm matters. That extra “very” doubles the self-awareness and turns the line into a controlled pratfall. The speaker isn’t ignorant; they’re undisciplined on purpose, or at least resigned to the fact that knowledge and behavior are different species.

The intent is comic, but the subtext is existential: reason is not in charge. Carroll, writing under the strictures of 19th-century respectability, uses playful language to smuggle in a darker realism about human inconsistency. It’s also a neat reversal of the era’s moral literature, which treated advice as a magic key: learn the lesson, become the person. Carroll’s Alice books are crowded with rules, manners, and instructions that collapse under the pressure of actual experience. This line (delivered by Alice in Wonderland) fits that world: guidance is abundant, agency is slippery, and the self is less a sovereign than a committee.

What makes it endure is how politely it indicts us. No melodrama, no self-hate - just the dry admission that the mind can draft perfect policy while the rest of us ignores it. It’s wit as a coping mechanism, and a tiny rebellion against the fantasy that rational people are rational all the way down.