Success Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

Cooley’s line sounds like a pep talk, but it’s really a quiet rebuke to the modern obsession with receipts: sales, reviews, prestige, proof. Coming from a sociologist best known for the “looking-glass self” - the idea that we become who we are through imagined judgments of others - the quote reads less like romantic mysticism and more like a diagnosis of social pressure. If your identity is constantly being negotiated in public, then “failure” becomes a social verdict, not an artistic fact.

“An artist cannot fail” doesn’t deny that a work can flop. It relocates the battleground. Cooley is stripping “artist” down to a mode of being: the commitment to perception, expression, and risk. That’s the trick of the sentence’s second half: “it is a success to be one.” Success isn’t positioned as an outcome but as an orientation - a refusal to let the crowd’s scoreboard define the self. The subtext is a kind of psychological self-defense: if you internalize external judgment, you’ll stop making anything interesting. If you anchor success in the act of artistic becoming, you stay mobile.

Context matters. Cooley wrote in an era when mass media and consumer culture were accelerating, turning taste into a public referendum. His claim anticipates today’s attention economy, where creators are told they’re only as good as their last metric. Cooley offers an older, sturdier standard: artistry is not a prize you win; it’s a practice you choose, and choosing it is already a victory against social conformity.