Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

A whole moral diagnosis fits inside Tate's blunt little balance sheet: inflated entitlement on one side, anemic effort on the other. "Men" here isn't just gender; it's mankind as a species that overdraws its account with reality. The line works because it turns an ethical failing into a matter of proportions. Expectation is portrayed as appetite, "too much" a kind of gluttony; action becomes the neglected muscle, "too little" a confession of sloth. Tate doesn't moralize with sermons or sentiment. He lands the criticism through arithmetic: the world doesn't meet us because we haven't met it.

The subtext is a swipe at modern confidence itself, the sense that society, art, politics, even God, ought to deliver meaning on demand. Tate, a Southern Agrarian and later a Catholic convert, spent his career wary of a culture that prized abstract ideals and technological "progress" while hollowing out the disciplines that make a life coherent: duty, craft, humility, attention. Read in the wake of world wars and the rise of mass society, the line sounds like a rebuke to citizens who want the benefits of civilization without the personal cost of sustaining it.

Its sting comes from how it denies us a flattering escape hatch. No villains are named, no institutions blamed. Tate pins the mismatch where it hurts most: in the gap between what we feel owed and what we're willing to build.