Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll slips a razor blade into a teacup. On the surface, he is offering a harmless multiple choice between two familiar bits of folk wisdom. Underneath, he is exposing how proverbs masquerade as guidance while functioning more like verbal costumes we swap depending on convenience. "Better late than never" flatters perseverance; it turns delay into redemption. "Better never than late" weaponizes punctuality into moral purity, making abstention look principled. Carroll sets them side by side and lets the contradiction indict the whole genre.

The intent is not to resolve the dilemma but to make the reader feel the wobble of certainty. Proverbs are supposed to be ballast, compact truths you can carry in your pocket. Carroll treats them as stage props: rotate the set, and the "truth" changes. That is very Victorian in its anxiety about rules and respectability, and very Carroll in his suspicion that language itself is a confidence trick.

The subtext also lands as a sly comment on social etiquette: in polite society, lateness is never just lateness; it is a tiny rebellion or a small insult. By proposing that "never" might be preferable, Carroll punctures the sanctimony of those who preach patience while privately tallying slights. It's wit with a moral sting: if your wisdom can be reversed without losing its rhythm, maybe what you love is the rhythm, not the wisdom.