Success Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray’s warning isn’t really about ambition; it’s about the peculiar boredom that follows getting exactly what you thought you wanted. The line lands with the dry pragmatism of a novelist who watched Victorian England turn “success” into a moral costume: a way to look respectable, safe, finished. “Do not be in a hurry to succeed” reads like friendly advice, but the bite is in the next sentence, which treats triumph as a kind of narrative death. If your life is structured as a sprint toward a single badge of arrival, what happens when you pin it on? You don’t get bliss; you get an empty calendar.

The craft here is in how he redefines the goal without preaching. “Better make the horizon your goal” swaps a measurable endpoint for a moving one, an image that refuses closure. The horizon is seductive precisely because it can’t be cashed in. It keeps the self in motion, not trapped in the anxieties of social ranking. Thackeray is also quietly satirizing the Victorian fixation on advancement - the idea that life is a ladder and the point is to stop climbing as high as possible. He’s telling you the ladder ends in stagnation.

Context matters: Thackeray made a career dissecting status hunger and self-deception in a culture intoxicated by upward mobility. This quote is a novelist’s version of plot wisdom: don’t rush the ending. Stay in the chapter where you’re still becoming.