Success Quote by Florence Scovel Shinn

Shinn’s line reads like a talisman from the early 20th-century self-help underground: part artist’s credo, part metaphysical pep talk, built to steady the hand right when it starts to shake. As an illustrator and a New Thought writer, she’s speaking from a world where “vision” isn’t just imagination or planning, but a kind of spiritual technology. “Manifestation” is the tell: she’s framing creative success as something you don’t simply build, you summon - by refusing to let the picture in your mind be overwritten by the mess on your desk.

The craft of the sentence is psychological. She stacks “every” twice to erase exceptions; it’s not some achievements, it’s all “great work.” That absolutism matters because the audience she’s courting is someone mid-wobble, looking for permission to quit. Then she slides in the twist: discouragement shows up “just before” the breakthrough. It’s a neat reframing of pain as proof-of-progress, converting what feels like evidence of failure into a milestone on the route.

There’s also a subtle moral instruction embedded in the rhetoric: if you stop, you didn’t merely run out of time or resources - you failed to “hold.” That places responsibility squarely on inner discipline, which is empowering and slightly coercive at once. In an era that was industrializing success and selling it back as mindset, Shinn offers a consoling narrative for artists and strivers: the dark dip isn’t a verdict; it’s the doorframe.