Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean Toomer

Toomer’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the modern fantasy of self-authorship. “Men try” signals not just human ambition but a particularly gendered confidence in mastery: the idea that a life can be engineered by willpower, preference, and personal branding. Then the sentence pivots, and the pivot is the point. “Life runs itself” strips the human subject of centrality. It’s almost mechanical, as if existence is an engine with its own fuel and logic. The clincher is “necessity” - not fate, not destiny, not romance. Necessity is colder: economics, biology, history, time, other people’s choices, the unglamorous constraints that don’t care what you want.

The subtext is a critique of both individualism and the era’s faith in progress-as-control. Toomer lived through seismic shifts - industrial modernity, World War I’s aftermath, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the hardening of Jim Crow - events that made “wishes” feel like a privilege some could afford to indulge more than others. His work often probes identity as something shaped by forces larger than personal preference, and this aphorism carries that pressure. It doesn’t argue that desire is pointless; it argues that desire is not sovereign.

What makes the quote work is its grammar of humiliation: humans “try,” life “runs.” One verb is tentative; the other is assured. The sentence doesn’t moralize. It simply reassigns agency, and in doing so, exposes the thinness of the story we tell ourselves about being in charge.