"An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing"
About this Quote
Smiles is selling a kind of psychological leverage: the idea that wanting something hard enough is not a daydream but a dry run. The phrasing is almost alchemical, turning the vapor of "possibility" into the solidity of "reality" through "intense anticipation". That intensity matters. He is not praising casual hope; he is prescribing a disciplined mental state that behaves like practice, tuning attention, sharpening habits, and making the future feel actionable rather than abstract.
The subtext is pure Victorian self-help, stamped with moral certainty. Smiles wrote in an era that prized self-improvement as both virtue and social policy, a time when industrial capitalism needed workers and strivers who could narrate hardship as a ladder. "Our desires being often but precursors" frames desire as evidence, almost an early diagnostic: if you want it, that wanting is already proof you can do it. It's an empowering claim, but also a quietly coercive one. If desire predicts capability, then failure starts to look like insufficient intensity, not structural constraint, bad luck, or uneven access.
The quote works because it fuses emotion with agency without admitting the seam. "Anticipation" feels passive, "performing" is plainly active; Smiles collapses the distance between them. It's motivational rhetoric with a Protestant spine: the mind should not merely wish, it should rehearse. Read now, it lands as both a useful cognitive insight (expectation shapes behavior) and an artifact of an ideology that turns inner life into a productivity tool.
The subtext is pure Victorian self-help, stamped with moral certainty. Smiles wrote in an era that prized self-improvement as both virtue and social policy, a time when industrial capitalism needed workers and strivers who could narrate hardship as a ladder. "Our desires being often but precursors" frames desire as evidence, almost an early diagnostic: if you want it, that wanting is already proof you can do it. It's an empowering claim, but also a quietly coercive one. If desire predicts capability, then failure starts to look like insufficient intensity, not structural constraint, bad luck, or uneven access.
The quote works because it fuses emotion with agency without admitting the seam. "Anticipation" feels passive, "performing" is plainly active; Smiles collapses the distance between them. It's motivational rhetoric with a Protestant spine: the mind should not merely wish, it should rehearse. Read now, it lands as both a useful cognitive insight (expectation shapes behavior) and an artifact of an ideology that turns inner life into a productivity tool.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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