Life & Wisdom Quote by Stuart Chase

Chase frames "attitude" less as a mood and more as a moral choice about reality itself. The line is blunt, almost prosecutorial: you are either cooperating with how the world works or you are insisting it should work differently. That binary is the point. By yoking a private, squishy word like attitude to the hard, impersonal phrase "natural laws", he drains it of self-help sentimentality and turns it into a philosophy of accountability.

The subtext is a warning against the American pastime of treating willpower as a substitute for physics, economics, biology, or social cause-and-effect. Chase wrote in a period when "scientific" thinking was being marketed as a cure for everything from industrial inefficiency to political disorder. In that climate, "natural laws" reads as more than gravity; it suggests the constraints of systems: scarcity, incentives, unintended consequences, the limits of the body. Your attitude, he implies, is revealed by whether you respect constraints or keep trying to negotiate with them.

It works rhetorically because it weaponizes inevitability. "Acceptance" and "rejection" are loaded verbs: one sounds mature, the other petulant. The quote flatters no one. It’s a secular sermon aimed at magical thinking, including the kind that dresses up as optimism. Chase isn’t arguing for fatalism; he’s arguing that agency begins where denial ends.