"The difficulty in life is the choice"
About this Quote
A novelist’s simplest sentence can smuggle in a whole worldview, and George A. Moore’s line does it with a kind of austere confidence. “The difficulty in life is the choice” doesn’t romanticize suffering or blame fate; it pins the daily anguish on the one thing modern people are told should liberate them: options. The phrasing is blunt, almost impatient. Life isn’t hard because of tragedy alone, but because deciding turns living into a constant act of authorship, and authorship carries guilt.
Moore wrote in a period when old certainties were losing their grip and the modern self was being asked to improvise its meaning. That cultural backdrop matters. Choice isn’t just picking between careers or lovers; it’s the slow realization that no priest, parent, or class system can fully absorb responsibility on your behalf. The subtext is accountability: once you choose, you can’t pretend you didn’t. Regret becomes the shadow that follows every decision, not because the alternative was surely better, but because imagination keeps it alive.
As a novelist, Moore also knows choice is where narrative begins. Plot is decision under pressure. By making “the choice” singular, he hints at something harsher: life’s difficulty isn’t any particular decision, but the condition of having to decide at all, repeatedly, without omniscience. The line works because it refuses consolation. It treats uncertainty not as a phase but as the permanent weather of being human in a modern world.
Moore wrote in a period when old certainties were losing their grip and the modern self was being asked to improvise its meaning. That cultural backdrop matters. Choice isn’t just picking between careers or lovers; it’s the slow realization that no priest, parent, or class system can fully absorb responsibility on your behalf. The subtext is accountability: once you choose, you can’t pretend you didn’t. Regret becomes the shadow that follows every decision, not because the alternative was surely better, but because imagination keeps it alive.
As a novelist, Moore also knows choice is where narrative begins. Plot is decision under pressure. By making “the choice” singular, he hints at something harsher: life’s difficulty isn’t any particular decision, but the condition of having to decide at all, repeatedly, without omniscience. The line works because it refuses consolation. It treats uncertainty not as a phase but as the permanent weather of being human in a modern world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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