Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll skewers a peculiarly Victorian vice: the obsession with being unimpeachable. The line has the snap of a nursery-room aphorism, but it’s really a quiet manifesto against the cult of propriety. “Things that nobody can possibly find fault with” sounds like moral hygiene, the kind of careful living that keeps your reputation tidy and your ambitions small. Carroll’s point is that faultlessness is not a standard of virtue so much as a strategy for avoiding risk - and that risk is where life’s actual work happens.

The quote also carries a sly mathematical joke: “nobody can possibly find fault” is an impossible condition. Human beings are expert fault-finders; if you do anything consequential, someone will call it wrong, tasteless, naive, too much, not enough. Carroll, who made an art out of logic puzzles and linguistic trapdoors, understands that the demand for universal approval is a paradox designed to immobilize you. It’s not caution; it’s self-censorship wearing a halo.

Context matters. Carroll wrote in a culture of intense social rules, where respectability could function like a surveillance system. His Alice books already wage war on authoritarian “sense” - adults who confuse rules with reality. Here, he’s offering the grown-up corollary: if your aim is to be uncriticizable, you’ll end up harmless, and “harmless” quickly becomes another word for irrelevant.