Success Quote by W. Clement Stone

A businessman’s faith in recurrence is never just philosophy; it’s a coping mechanism dressed as pattern recognition. “Events tend to recur in cycles” reads like calm counsel, but the subtext is bracingly practical: don’t panic when the graph dips, and don’t get drunk when it spikes. Stone came up in a century of whiplash economics - boom, bust, war, postwar expansion, inflation, deregulation - the kind of lived history that turns “history repeats” into an operating principle for surviving capitalism.

The sentence is intentionally soft. “Tend to” gives him plausible deniability against the obvious rebuttal (cycles aren’t clocks; they misfire, mutate, and sometimes break). “Events” is broad enough to cover markets, careers, and personal setbacks without committing to a single predictive claim. That vagueness is the point: it works as a mental model you can carry anywhere, from sales slumps to recessions.

What’s most revealing is the managerial posture. In Stone’s world, the worst sin isn’t being wrong; it’s being reactive. Cycles imply you can prepare, conserve, and time your risks. They also imply a moral lesson that business culture loves: today’s hardship isn’t fate, it’s a season. The line flatters the reader into steadiness, suggesting that discipline and patience are competitive advantages because the environment, like weather, will swing back.

It’s optimism with teeth: not “everything will work out,” but “it comes back around if you stay in the game.”