Daily Inspiration Quote by Louis Kronenberger

Kronenberger is skewering a particularly modern comfort: the smug relief of finding someone more obnoxious than we are. The line works because it exposes vanity as a shape-shifter. Even when we appear humble, we may just be performing a more socially acceptable species of self-regard. Watching another person preen gives us a comparison point, and comparison is vanity's favorite fuel. Their excess becomes our alibi.

The phrasing is a critic's scalpel. "Nothing so soothes" treats vanity like an itch we keep scratching, suggesting the emotion isn't an occasional flaw but a chronic condition. Then comes the neat reversal: other people's vanity doesn't merely irritate us, it calms us. Why? Because it lets us feel superior without doing anything difficult like improving ourselves. We get the pleasure of judgment, plus a ready-made narrative: I am not like that.

The kicker, "vain...of our modesty", is where the subtext turns acidic. Modesty, supposedly the antidote, becomes another badge to polish. It's an early diagnosis of what we'd now call virtue-signaling or ironic detachment: the pleasure of seeming above the fray while still centering the self. As a mid-20th-century cultural critic, Kronenberger was steeped in performance, taste, and social posing; he understood that manners and restraint can be as competitive as flamboyance. The joke lands because it traps the reader: if you nodded along, you're already implicated.