Wit & Attitude Quote by Elizabeth Gaskell

Gaskell slips a small knife into Victorian respectability: wisdom, that prized moral currency, is not automatically lovable. The line turns on a contrarian pleasure - “one likes foolish people for their folly” - suggesting that folly can be a social virtue, even a kind of honesty. Foolishness here isn’t idiocy so much as unguardedness: the person who blurts, misjudges, over-feels, and therefore doesn’t weaponize insight. Against them stand the “wise people,” whose wisdom can read as performative, managerial, and quietly coercive. Being right is easy to turn into being superior.

The intent is not to glorify ignorance; it’s to demote intellect from its throne as the primary measure of character. Gaskell is interested in the emotional economics of a room: who relaxes others, who tightens them. Folly can disarm, invite affection, and create community because it signals you’re not competing for dominance. Wisdom, by contrast, can arrive like a verdict. You can feel it before it’s spoken - the calibrated tone, the moral accounting, the sense that you’re being improved against your will.

Context matters. In Gaskell’s world of class scrutiny, religious judgment, and social policing, “wisdom” often belongs to people with the power to define what counts as sensible. Her novels repeatedly sympathize with the socially awkward, the impulsive, the “wrong” sort - not because they’re always correct, but because their errors are human-scale. The sharpness of the aphorism is that it names a truth still current: we don’t only admire people; we choose who feels safe to be around.