Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Claudel

Claudel turns a nursery-rhyme image into a scalpel: the diplomat’s “long nose” is both a physical caricature and a moral diagnosis. The line lands because it pretends to offer praise - “fortunate” - while delivering a compact indictment. Long noses are useful, he suggests, because diplomats rarely see past their own immediate instruments: protocol, posture, the next communiqué. The joke isn’t just that they’re short-sighted; it’s that the system rewards short-sightedness. A long nose becomes a prosthetic for limited vision, a comic adaptation to institutional myopia.

The subtext is theatrical, which fits Claudel the dramatist. Diplomacy appears as performance art: costumes (decorum), props (documents), blocking (summits), with actors trained to project farsighted “statesmanship” while being structurally incentivized to avoid it. The nose points forward like an arrow, but it also blocks the face; self-interest and careerism sit literally in the line of sight. Claudel’s cynicism is aimed less at individual diplomats than at the role itself, a job designed to manage appearances and defer consequences.

Context matters: Claudel lived through an era when polite dispatches often masked catastrophic realities - imperial competition, the run-up to world wars, and the brittle faith that a well-phrased note could outrun mass politics. His quip compresses that disillusionment into a single, memorable grotesque. It’s funny because it’s petty; it stings because it feels true.