Life & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

There is something deliciously surgical in Moore calling moral busybody-ism a "passion" and then diagnosing it as a "disease". She takes an impulse most people dress up as virtue - correcting, educating, improving - and reframes it as pathology: not just annoying, but afflictive, the kind of condition that harms both the carrier and the surrounding crowd. The word "setting" matters. It suggests people are objects slightly out of place, furniture to be rearranged, not agents with their own gravity. Moore’s complaint isn’t that truth is useless; it’s that the compulsion to administer it can be a form of vanity.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the crusader temperament: the person who cannot let a flawed opinion, an impolite habit, a different taste survive in the room. Moore implies that this urge feeds on itself. Like any itch you scratch, it gets worse, demanding a larger territory of wrongness to correct. And because it’s "in itself" the disease, the supposed cure (more correction, more policing) is also the symptom.

Context helps. Moore wrote from inside a modernist milieu that prized precision and restraint, skeptical of grandstanding and ideological swagger. As a poet, she understood how badly language can be weaponized when it’s pressed into service of righteousness rather than clarity. The line reads like self-defense for the attentive, the private, the non-combative: a reminder that being right is not the same thing as being well, and that the appetite to fix others often disguises a refusal to examine oneself.