Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

“Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue” is Marquis at his most dryly subversive: a jab at the pieties of reform culture and the self-flattering idea that people become good because someone gave them a sermon and a ladder. “Uplifted” is the tell. It evokes Progressive Era moralism, temperance lectures, civic clubs, and the whole improvement-industrial complex that treated character as a product you could distribute from above. Marquis, a journalist with a satirist’s allergy to sanctimony, punctures that vertical fantasy in one clause.

“Seduced” does the real work. It borrows the language of temptation and turns it inside out, implying that human behavior is rarely ruled by abstract duty. We move toward what feels rewarding, glamorous, socially legible. Virtue, then, isn’t a grim staircase; it’s a door you make attractive enough that people walk through willingly. The subtext is both cynical and practical: if you want better citizens, you don’t browbeat them into it, you design incentives, stories, and rituals that make goodness pleasurable or status-conferring.

Marquis is also mocking the moralist’s ego. “Uplift” presumes a superior lifter and an inferior lifted. “Seduce” levels the hierarchy: you have to meet people where their desires live, not where your ideals want them to be. There’s a media-savvy insight here, too. Journalism and advertising were learning how persuasion actually works in modern mass society. Marquis simply admits the uncomfortable part: virtue competes in the same attention economy as vice, and it wins only when it learns to flirt.