"Mystery is not profoundness"
About this Quote
A neat little scalpel aimed at one of culture's most durable pretenses: the idea that if something is hard to parse, it must be deep. Colton, a sharp-edged moralist of the early 19th century, writes from a world thick with sermons, sentiment, and grand philosophical systems, where obscurity could pass as authority. "Mystery is not profoundness" is a warning label for readers and a dare to writers: stop confusing fog for altitude.
The line works because it flips a common social reflex. People often treat confusion as a personal failure ("I must be missing the point"), which gives the speaker or text unearned power. Colton exposes that power play. Mystery can be strategic: a way to avoid accountability, to seem wiser than you are, to keep critics at bay. Profoundness, by contrast, implies contact with something real - an idea that survives paraphrase, scrutiny, and daylight.
There's also a moral subtext. In Colton's era, "mystery" had theological prestige; faith often claimed strength precisely where reason reached its limits. Colton isn't necessarily rejecting mystery in religion or art, but he's rejecting the lazy argument that incomprehensibility equals truth. He's calling for intellectual honesty: if you can't explain it, you might not understand it; if you won't explain it, you might be selling something.
The quote lands now because our status economy still rewards the performative opaque - from jargon-heavy corporate talk to intentionally cryptic "disruption" rhetoric to artsy vagueness marketed as genius. Colton's sentence is a compact anti-scam device: clarity isn't shallowness; sometimes it's the proof of depth.
The line works because it flips a common social reflex. People often treat confusion as a personal failure ("I must be missing the point"), which gives the speaker or text unearned power. Colton exposes that power play. Mystery can be strategic: a way to avoid accountability, to seem wiser than you are, to keep critics at bay. Profoundness, by contrast, implies contact with something real - an idea that survives paraphrase, scrutiny, and daylight.
There's also a moral subtext. In Colton's era, "mystery" had theological prestige; faith often claimed strength precisely where reason reached its limits. Colton isn't necessarily rejecting mystery in religion or art, but he's rejecting the lazy argument that incomprehensibility equals truth. He's calling for intellectual honesty: if you can't explain it, you might not understand it; if you won't explain it, you might be selling something.
The quote lands now because our status economy still rewards the performative opaque - from jargon-heavy corporate talk to intentionally cryptic "disruption" rhetoric to artsy vagueness marketed as genius. Colton's sentence is a compact anti-scam device: clarity isn't shallowness; sometimes it's the proof of depth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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