Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

More sketches a scene that feels almost too contemporary: a crowd willingly miserable in public, and the educated observer retreating indoors, convinced persuasion is pointless. The image is plain - people swarming the streets, soaked every day, refusing shelter - but it functions like a moral weather report. Rain is misrule, superstition, bad collective habits; the street is the arena where those habits reproduce themselves by sheer momentum. What stings is the second half: the spectators "keep themselves within their houses", not out of comfort but out of a cultivated resignation. They "cannot remedy the folly", so they choose private sanity over public struggle.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it reads as a pragmatic defense of withdrawal: why exhaust yourself arguing with a majority determined to suffer? On another, it quietly indicts that posture. More is too sharp a writer to let the "wise" off the hook. The line turns on the small, damning word "they do keep": a habitual, self-justifying retreat dressed up as realism. The subtext is about complicity - when elites decide the public is unreachable, they surrender the street to the rainmakers.

Context matters. More lived in a Europe where mass belief, state power, and religious authority could make dissent both futile and fatal. He knew what it cost to stand outside the house. That tension animates the passage: an almost clinical observation of crowd irrationality shadowed by the uncomfortable question of what, exactly, the bystander owes to a drenched public.