"You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff"
About this Quote
A cleric telling you you are "wise, witty and wonderful" isn’t just complimenting you; he’s disarming you. Frank Crane leads with a three-part benediction - almost liturgical in its rhythm - so the rebuke that follows lands as care rather than scolding. The line is built like a pastoral intervention: affirmation first, then the worry.
"Reading this sort of stuff" does the real work. It’s deliberately vague, a hand-wave toward a category of material Crane thinks is mentally corrosive: sensational journalism, cynical satire, gossip, maybe even the era’s briskly modern amusements that traded in outrage and cheap knowingness. By not naming it, he turns the phrase into a mirror; the reader supplies their own guilty pleasure. The subtext is less about intelligence than about attention. You can be bright and charming, Crane implies, and still let your inner weather be set by whatever you keep consuming.
Crane wrote in a moment when mass media was getting louder and faster, when "being informed" could curdle into being perpetually agitated. His clerical vantage point makes the admonition feel moral, but it’s also pragmatic: your mind becomes like what you feed it. The jab is gentle, even witty, because it’s aimed at a particular modern temptation - confusing perpetual intake with actual growth. It’s not anti-reading; it’s anti-frittering a gifted self on content that trains you to be reactive, smug, or merely busy.
"Reading this sort of stuff" does the real work. It’s deliberately vague, a hand-wave toward a category of material Crane thinks is mentally corrosive: sensational journalism, cynical satire, gossip, maybe even the era’s briskly modern amusements that traded in outrage and cheap knowingness. By not naming it, he turns the phrase into a mirror; the reader supplies their own guilty pleasure. The subtext is less about intelligence than about attention. You can be bright and charming, Crane implies, and still let your inner weather be set by whatever you keep consuming.
Crane wrote in a moment when mass media was getting louder and faster, when "being informed" could curdle into being perpetually agitated. His clerical vantage point makes the admonition feel moral, but it’s also pragmatic: your mind becomes like what you feed it. The jab is gentle, even witty, because it’s aimed at a particular modern temptation - confusing perpetual intake with actual growth. It’s not anti-reading; it’s anti-frittering a gifted self on content that trains you to be reactive, smug, or merely busy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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