Wit & Attitude Quote by Don Marquis

A journalist’s eye can be merciless, and Don Marquis aims it at the modern creature who confuses motion with meaning. The line lands because it’s built like a punchline with a bruise under it: people “don’t know what they want,” yet they’ll “go through hell to get it.” That contradiction is the whole critique. Desire, in Marquis’s world, isn’t a compass; it’s a treadmill. The agony isn’t accidental, either. “Willing” implies consent, even pride. Suffering becomes proof of seriousness when clarity is missing.

The intent is less to scold individual indecision than to diagnose a culture that rewards striving over understanding. Marquis wrote in an America racing through industrial capitalism, mass advertising, and a rising mythology of self-making. Wants could be manufactured, swapped, upgraded. When the market and the crowd can supply your cravings on demand, it gets harder to distinguish appetite from purpose. You chase the promotion, the status, the romance-as-plot, because the chase itself is socially legible. Knowing what you want requires solitude and risk; pursuing whatever is dangled in front of you earns applause.

Subtext: “hell” isn’t just external hardship. It’s the psychic cost of misdirected ambition - burnout, envy, performative hustling, the grim satisfaction of earning something that still doesn’t fit. Marquis’s cynicism works because it refuses a comforting moral. People aren’t victims of confusion; they’re collaborators in it, clinging to the drama of pursuit because it spares them the quieter terror of asking, plainly, “What would actually be enough?”