Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s line lands like a magician’s aside: ignore the glittering apparatus and the trick will still work. Coming from the author who made nonsense feel inevitable, “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves” is less a scold than a sly inversion. Victorian prose prized polish; Carroll suggests polish is a byproduct, not the goal. Get the meaning right and the music of the sentence follows, as if language has its own internal acoustics once the idea is clear.

The subtext is a quiet jab at performative eloquence. “Sounds” stands in for rhetorical peacocking: the ornamental rhythm, the clever phrasing, the verbal curlicues that can disguise thin thinking. Carroll, a logician as much as a fantasist, treats clarity as the engine and style as exhaust. That’s funny in context because his work is famously sonic: puns, poems, mouth-feel. Yet he’s warning that wordplay without conceptual spine becomes mere noise. In Wonderland terms, it’s the Mad Hatter talking forever without landing anywhere.

The intent also reads like practical advice to writers and speakers: stop chasing “beautiful sentences” and chase precision. Carroll’s own best effects depend on that discipline. His nonsense is engineered; it feels free because the underlying logic is tight. The line flatters neither the show-off nor the purist. It argues that sense is not anti-aesthetic; it’s the condition that lets aesthetics endure. Style that survives rereading usually isn’t the loudest. It’s the clearest.