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There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
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“There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.”

Sinclair Lewis

Source
Main Street
Date
1920
Meaning

Meaning of “There are two insults which no human being…”

Lewis satirizes two kinds of self-image people defend fiercely: being able to laugh and believing their own life has contained genuine difficulty.

Source context

Where does it come from?

Main Street, Project Gutenberg #543. The narrator gives this comic generalization immediately before Carol reacts angrily to Vida’s suggestion that she has not suffered; it is satirical fiction, not a psychological finding about every person.

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Themes

Ideas connected with this quotation

FunnyHard TimesExperiencePerspectiveSelf-AwarenessSuffering
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“Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

O. Henry · The Gift of the Magi · 1905
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O. Henry turns Della’s financial distress into a comic-sad observation that ordinary life often mixes sorrow, small complaints and happiness rather than arriving in a single emotional register.

Source details

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although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
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“although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”

Helen Keller · Optimism: An Essay · 1903
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The sentence holds suffering and human overcoming together, giving Keller’s optimism a basis in endurance rather than pretending suffering is absent.

Source details

Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. The surrounding passage explicitly says her optimism does not rest on the absence of evil.

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Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.
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“Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.”

Mark Twain · Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar · 1894
Voice: Epigraph / fictional source voice · Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Meaning & context

Twain shrinks a grand biblical origin story to the ordinary misery of teething, using disproportion between subject and complaint as the comic mechanism.

Source details

Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter IV epigraph; a comic Calendar maxim rather than dialogue by a character in the chapter.

Source identified
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own;
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“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own;”

Jonathan Swift · The Battle of the Books — Preface · 1704
Meaning & context

Swift jokes that readers readily recognize other people in satire while overlooking themselves, making self-exemption part of the very behavior satire exposes.

Source details

The Battle of the Books, 'The Preface of the Author,' represented by Project Gutenberg #623. Swift's 'satire is a sort of glass' image opens the Preface and explains why readers recognize other people's faults more readily than their own. The retained semicolon marks a frozen excerpt from a longer sentence; this is satirical/literary metaphor rather than a psychological measurement rule.

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We live, as we dream—alone.
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“We live, as we dream—alone.”

Joseph Conrad · Heart of Darkness · 1899
Meaning & context

Marlow describes the difficulty of transferring the full inner texture of experience to another person, suggesting that some dimensions of consciousness remain irreducibly private.

Source details

Heart of Darkness, Part I, Project Gutenberg #219. Marlow says ‘We live, as we dream—alone’ while explaining to his listeners that the lived ‘life-sensation’ of an earlier period cannot be fully conveyed to another person. The line remains fictional narration inside Conrad's colonial-era novella rather than a clinical or universal psychological finding about loneliness.