"There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation"
About this Quote
John Ciardi folds a sly wink into a line that sounds virtuous at first and subversive a beat later. The reversal hinges on the double sense of sobriety: abstaining from drink and maintaining a sober, solemn disposition. Praising sobriety only when taken in moderation teases the temperance ideal by implying that total abstinence and relentless seriousness can be as distorting as excess. It is not a call to abandon restraint but a reminder that zeal for any single virtue, when pushed to extremes, becomes a vice. Pleasure requires guardrails; life also requires laughter. The point is balance, sharpened by wit.
As a poet, critic, and translator with a knack for epigram, Ciardi delighted in puncturing the puffed-up. He served as poetry editor of the Saturday Review and translated Dante, a writer who knew something about the gradations of sin and measure. A line like this falls squarely in the tradition of the humane, conversational moralist who values proportion. It draws on the old classical sense of the golden mean, but replaces solemn instruction with a joke light enough to carry the message without preaching. The humor disarms, then instructs: be wary of puritan severity, but equally wary of indulgence that mistakes rebellion for freedom.
Read against mid-20th-century American culture, the quip nudges two tendencies at once: a country still shadowed by a puritan heritage and one enchanted by cocktail-hour bravado. It mocks both the finger-wagging reformer and the barroom philosopher. Somewhere between abstinence and excess lies a lively, humane way of living that can take a drink or pass on one, can be serious when seriousness is called for and gleefully unserious when play restores perspective. Sobriety, like all good things, works best when it does not try to monopolize the soul.
As a poet, critic, and translator with a knack for epigram, Ciardi delighted in puncturing the puffed-up. He served as poetry editor of the Saturday Review and translated Dante, a writer who knew something about the gradations of sin and measure. A line like this falls squarely in the tradition of the humane, conversational moralist who values proportion. It draws on the old classical sense of the golden mean, but replaces solemn instruction with a joke light enough to carry the message without preaching. The humor disarms, then instructs: be wary of puritan severity, but equally wary of indulgence that mistakes rebellion for freedom.
Read against mid-20th-century American culture, the quip nudges two tendencies at once: a country still shadowed by a puritan heritage and one enchanted by cocktail-hour bravado. It mocks both the finger-wagging reformer and the barroom philosopher. Somewhere between abstinence and excess lies a lively, humane way of living that can take a drink or pass on one, can be serious when seriousness is called for and gleefully unserious when play restores perspective. Sobriety, like all good things, works best when it does not try to monopolize the soul.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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