Life & Wisdom Quote by Jules Romains

Romains’ line lands with the blunt force of a diagnosis: not “unfair,” not “sometimes cruel,” but “an enormous injustice.” The scale matters. By choosing “world” instead of “life,” he shifts the target from personal misfortune to a whole system - history, institutions, economies, even luck itself - that distributes pain and privilege with spectacular indifference. “Enormous” does double duty: it amplifies the outrage and hints at the paralyzing size of the problem, the way injustice can feel less like a series of fixable wrongs than the atmosphere you breathe.

Romains wrote in a France racked by modernity’s promises and betrayals: industrial capitalism, mass politics, the First World War, and the uneasy interwar years that made moral certainty look naive. As a figure associated with Unanimism, he was attuned to crowd psychology and the collective currents that swallow individual agency. In that light, the sentence is less private despair than civic realism: suffering isn’t just tragic; it’s organized.

The subtext is a dare to comforting narratives. If the world is structured as injustice, then “deserving” becomes suspect, charity starts to look like a bandage over design flaws, and optimism risks complicity. Yet the line also smuggles in a moral standard: you can’t name injustice without believing, at least faintly, in justice. That tension - between clear-eyed bitterness and an implied demand for repair - is what gives the quote its staying power. It refuses consolation while quietly insisting we shouldn’t get used to it.