Life & Wisdom Quote by Jan Morris

A neat little paradox, sharpened to a point: Morris defends the miniature against our reflex to confuse size with significance. The line works because it anticipates the reader's suspicion - small equals trivial, narrow, maybe even mean-spirited - and then flips it. "Not petty" swats away the moral judgment we often attach to modest scale. "On the contrary" is the pivot, a formal phrase that gives the reversal a courtroom crispness, as if the case has been tried and the verdict is in. Then comes "profound", a word usually reserved for big ideas, big souls, big landscapes. Morris smuggles it into the small.

The intent is both aesthetic and ethical. As a travel writer who often made her case through close observation rather than sweeping theory, Morris prized the telling detail: a street corner, a local ritual, the particular weather of a port city. The subtext is a rebuke to modern gigantism - to empires, grand narratives, and the tourist's craving for the monumental. Smallness here signals concentration, not scarcity: intimacy, precision, the kind of meaning you only get when you stop trying to dominate a place and instead let it press back on you.

Read in the shadow of Morris's wider sensibility - attuned to cities, borders, and identities that don't fit into simple categories - the line also hints at a politics of attention. What we dismiss as minor is often where reality hides its complexity. Profundity, Morris suggests, doesn't announce itself with a trumpet; it fits in your palm.