"Many are called but few get up"
About this Quote
A razor-thin joke with a long cultural tail: Herford takes a line that arrives in English with the full velvet authority of the King James Bible ("Many are called, but few are chosen") and trips it on the carpet of everyday laziness. The swap from "chosen" to "get up" is funny because it’s almost offensively small-bore. Salvation is replaced by the alarm clock. Eternity collapses into the morning.
That’s the intent: puncture grand moral language by revealing how easily it can be repurposed, how quickly the sacred becomes a slogan for the banal. Herford, a poet and humorist steeped in late-Victorian/early-20th-century wit, understood that modern life was already secularizing old certainties. In that climate, biblical phrasing still carried immense cultural weight even for audiences who treated it more as shared idiom than doctrine. The punchline works because the reader feels the original cadence underneath; the joke is essentially a theft of authority.
Subtextually, it’s a tiny parable about self-mythologizing. We love to imagine ourselves "called" - destined, gifted, selected - while the real test is embarrassingly logistical: will we actually move? Herford is skewering aspiration without effort, the way people cling to the romance of purpose but dodge the work of habit. It’s also a soft jab at sermons and self-help alike: lofty exhortations don’t matter if your body stays in bed. The line’s brilliance is its economy; it makes a moral argument while pretending to be nothing but a quip.
That’s the intent: puncture grand moral language by revealing how easily it can be repurposed, how quickly the sacred becomes a slogan for the banal. Herford, a poet and humorist steeped in late-Victorian/early-20th-century wit, understood that modern life was already secularizing old certainties. In that climate, biblical phrasing still carried immense cultural weight even for audiences who treated it more as shared idiom than doctrine. The punchline works because the reader feels the original cadence underneath; the joke is essentially a theft of authority.
Subtextually, it’s a tiny parable about self-mythologizing. We love to imagine ourselves "called" - destined, gifted, selected - while the real test is embarrassingly logistical: will we actually move? Herford is skewering aspiration without effort, the way people cling to the romance of purpose but dodge the work of habit. It’s also a soft jab at sermons and self-help alike: lofty exhortations don’t matter if your body stays in bed. The line’s brilliance is its economy; it makes a moral argument while pretending to be nothing but a quip.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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