Success Quote by George Edward Woodberry

Woodberry’s line is a critic’s credo disguised as a pep talk. The neat reversal is the point: he downgrades defeat - the thing public life most visibly punishes - and upgrades refusal, the quieter sin that leaves no scars and therefore no evidence. It’s a moral reframing that flatters ambition while also policing it. If you try and lose, you’re still in the arena of meaning; if you never risk a verdict, you’ve opted out of the only process that can produce growth, art, or character. For a professional trained to judge books, arguments, and reputations, that’s not abstract. Criticism depends on the premise that attempts matter, even flawed ones, because they reveal intention and make standards legible.

The subtext is sharpened by Woodberry’s era. As a late-19th-century American man of letters, he’s writing in a culture intoxicated by progress and anxious about softness: industrial expansion, professionalization, and the rising authority of “merit” all put pressure on individuals to perform and to be seen performing. “Not to have tried” is cowardice, yes, but also a kind of social selfishness - hoarding your potential from the public record.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s a corrective to shame. It doesn’t deny loss; it reassigns disgrace. Defeat becomes an acceptable cost of seriousness, while inaction is cast as the only outcome with no redeeming narrative. In a critic’s mouth, that’s also a plea: make the work, make the attempt, give us something worth judging.