Life & Wisdom Quote by E. E. Cummings

Self-belief isn’t a trophy in E. E. Cummings; it’s a permit. The line treats confidence less as self-esteem discourse and more as a practical precondition for being fully porous to life. “Once we believe in ourselves” sets a threshold: before that, experience is filtered through self-protection, performance, and the quiet dread of being exposed. After it, you can “risk” the very things that make you look foolish - curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight. Cummings chooses the verb “risk” to puncture the Hallmark sheen. Joy is not free; it costs you composure, certainty, and sometimes social approval.

The subtext is anti-cynicism without being naive. Cummings wrote in the wake of World War I disillusionment (he was briefly imprisoned by the French for suspected espionage), and his modernism often answered a mechanized, bureaucratic age with an insistence on the unruly interior. Here, “human spirit” isn’t a vague inspirational noun; it’s what survives when you stop managing your image and let experience move through you unedited.

The structure also matters: a cascade of nouns (“curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight”) that feels like a mind opening in real time. Cummings, famous for formal play, keeps the diction plain but makes the psychology sharp: believing in yourself isn’t about being impressive. It’s about becoming available - to surprise, to tenderness, to the kind of unguarded attention that an anxious culture trains out of us.