Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

“Pity the meek” is a neat little crowbar slipped into one of the best-known promises in Western moral language. Marquis takes the Beatitude “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” and swaps blessing for pity, turning a spiritual reward into a backhanded condolence. The joke lands because it preserves the cadence and authority of Scripture while gutting its optimism. You read it with your Sunday-school ear, then realize you’ve been played.

The intent is less to sneer at meekness than to expose how often society weaponizes it. “Inherit the earth” is supposedly triumph; Marquis implies it’s more like being left with the bill. The meek will “inherit” what the assertive have already used up: the mess, the drudgery, the moral responsibility, the thankless labor of holding communities together while louder people take the spoils. Pity, in this reading, isn’t compassion for the virtuous; it’s recognition of a rigged economy of temperament.

As a journalist working in an America newly fluent in mass advertising, corporate power, and public-relations morality, Marquis had reason to distrust official virtue-talk. His line works like a headline: compact, memorizable, and faintly scandalous. It also flatters the reader’s cynicism, inviting a knowing nod at the gap between preached ethics and lived incentives. The subtext is that meekness functions as a social lubricant for everyone except the meek themselves, who get rewarded with righteousness while others get rewarded with results.