Where wit is a form of criticism or mockery, humor includes an element of self-criticism or self-mockery; where wit tends to procl...aim imperfection, humor wryly acknowledges it; where wit undresses you, humor goes naked. At its best, humor simultaneously hurts and heals, makes one larger from a willingness to make oneself less. It has essentially much more breadth than wit, from being much more universal in appeal and human in effect. If harder to translate or explain, it often need not be explained or translated at all, revealing itself in a sudden gesture, a happy juxtaposition. We speak constantly of "the humor of the situation," almost never of the wit; just so, virtually everything that is farcical or funny derives from humor gone a bit wild.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has it...s great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having de...termined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit.... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be c...onsidered a good guy. Americans are almost as fearful of being thought eccentric as the English of not seeming like the genuine article. I once knew an Englishman who refused to go out on Easter Monday for fear of being detected in London when all the right people would be elsewhere; but when he went forth on less dangerous occasions, his get-ups were such as no American would wear to a dogfight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The prig never learns anything unconsciously or instinctively. He learns only what he feels is worth learning; anything else he no...t only scorns but fears, or regards as compromise, contamination, deterioration. Your prig lives in a kind of many-windowed, not to say entirely glassed-in, dwelling, bathed in a prim religious light; but the windows themselves he never opens, for fear that something may blow in from the street. He wants light without air, he prefers purity to humanity, in all too many cases the campus to the cosmos. He is the most complacent of men, where the snob will often be the most worried; and he is not, like the snob, observant, so he is not, like the snob, adaptable. He is rigid equally by temperament and by training--rigid in all big ways, where the snob is only in small. For the snob, at his Proust-like task of studying the great world, there may be only one place to go for neckties; for the prig there is only one way of going to heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »