"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure"
About this Quote
Eliot takes a scalpel to the Victorian obsession with respectability and replaces it with a tougher, more unsettling virtue: audacity that risks embarrassment. The line refuses the comforting binary of success vs. failure. It elevates a particular kind of loss - the kind earned by sustained effort - over the clean, socially legible safety of never trying. “Long perseverance” is the tell: she’s not romanticizing rash leaps or tragic flaws, but the unglamorous stamina of someone who keeps going long after applause, certainty, or youth has run out. That’s where grandeur lives, she argues: in endurance that can be measured in scars.
The subtext is a critique of moral cowardice masquerading as prudence. Eliot suggests that a life arranged to avoid failure is not neutral; it’s a quiet form of self-erasure, a refusal to stake a claim in the world. Calling the alternative “a striving good enough to be called a failure” is slyly generous - it implies that failure is not a verdict on worth but evidence of having attempted something commensurate with your capacities. Only meaningful ambitions can produce meaningful failures.
Context matters: Eliot wrote in a culture anxious about reputation, especially for women and outsiders. Her own life - a pen name, a controversial partnership, a career built against social penalty - makes the line read less like motivational poster wisdom and more like a hard-won defense of difficult choices. It’s an argument that dignity doesn’t come from being untouched; it comes from being tested.
The subtext is a critique of moral cowardice masquerading as prudence. Eliot suggests that a life arranged to avoid failure is not neutral; it’s a quiet form of self-erasure, a refusal to stake a claim in the world. Calling the alternative “a striving good enough to be called a failure” is slyly generous - it implies that failure is not a verdict on worth but evidence of having attempted something commensurate with your capacities. Only meaningful ambitions can produce meaningful failures.
Context matters: Eliot wrote in a culture anxious about reputation, especially for women and outsiders. Her own life - a pen name, a controversial partnership, a career built against social penalty - makes the line read less like motivational poster wisdom and more like a hard-won defense of difficult choices. It’s an argument that dignity doesn’t come from being untouched; it comes from being tested.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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