Success Quote by Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome is doing that very English trick of sounding kindly while quietly skewering the moral vanity of his age. In an era that loved earnest self-improvement and public virtue-signaling (Victorian respectability with the receipts), he flips the social script: what binds us isn’t the polished list of virtues we present at dinner, but the private catalogue of blunders we’d rather keep off the mantel.

The intent is both consoling and corrective. Consoling, because it reframes failure as a shared language instead of a personal defect. Corrective, because it punctures the smugness that often rides along with “virtue” talk. Virtues can create hierarchy: the virtuous stand taller, the less virtuous shrink. Faults level the room. Sympathy arrives not through admiration but recognition - that electric moment when someone else’s mistake gives you permission to be human.

The subtext is quietly cynical about social performance. We’re trained to bond through curated excellence, but Jerome suggests that admiration is a thin glue: it keeps people at a respectful distance. Follies, by contrast, invite intimacy because they require vulnerability; they demand the listener respond with mercy or humor, not applause.

Context matters: Jerome built a career on comedy that treats ordinary incompetence as a form of truth-telling. The line isn’t a celebration of dysfunction; it’s a reminder that community is forged less by ideals than by the messy, repeatable reality of falling short.