Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll nails a truth that feels almost rude in its simplicity: communication is less a pipeline than a hall of mirrors. Coming from the author who built entire worlds out of puns, riddles, and slippery logic, the line reads as both confession and warning. He isn’t romanticizing ineffability; he’s pointing to the practical, maddening gap between what we think and what we can successfully transmit.

The intent is methodological. “Convey a meaning accurately” treats meaning like a precise object, but the sentence itself undercuts that fantasy. Accuracy implies a shared ruler, yet minds don’t share measurement systems. Language arrives already dented by habit, class, education, mood, and the listener’s private associations. The subtext is Carroll’s signature: the more you chase precision, the more you discover how unstable your tools are. In Alice, even simple statements become traps because words don’t stay put; they negotiate, they misbehave, they get cross-examined.

Context matters. Carroll was a logician and mathematician as well as a storyteller, writing in a Victorian culture that prized propriety and “correct” expression. That tension between formal clarity and lived ambiguity is the engine of his work. The line also anticipates a modern anxiety: that misunderstanding isn’t an exception but the default setting. What makes it land is its quiet indictment of both speaker and listener. If meaning can’t be reliably shipped from one skull to another, then certainty starts to look less like knowledge and more like arrogance.