"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure"
About this Quote
To call failure grand is to honor the courage it takes to attempt something worthy, knowing it may never come to fruition. The line refuses the shallow arithmetic that treats outcomes as the only measure of worth. A collapse after long perseverance records a history of patience, endurance, and imagination; it proves the goal was large enough to stretch a life. By contrast, never striving enough to fail signals a fear of exposure, a cramped refusal to test oneself against reality.
George Eliot wrote with a moral realism that sees character formed through sustained effort, not instantaneous victories. Her novels often follow figures whose highest hopes exceed what their circumstances will bear: Dorothea Brooke, yearning to do good at scale; Tertius Lydgate, driven by scientific ambition; Maggie Tulliver, torn between impulse and duty. Their projects often falter, sometimes painfully, yet the narrative confers dignity precisely because they dared to align action with ideals. The grandeur lies not in public trophies but in the seriousness of the attempt and the sympathy it summons.
Set against a Victorian culture that prized progress and utility, the sentiment adds a human counterpoint. Success can be crude, mistaking luck or conformity for virtue. Perseverance dignifies the person by revealing steadiness under friction, humility before complexity, and loyalty to a purpose through time. Failure, then, is not a blot but a signature of moral reach: evidence that one has aimed beyond the safe circumference of habit.
Eliot’s own career required stout persistence and a willingness to risk censure, from adopting a male pen name to living unconventionally and laboring over demanding books. The counsel is not to worship failure, but to prefer a life large enough to court it. Better to be measured by the depth of one’s striving than by the tidy avoidance of loss, for perseverance discloses character, and character, not outcome, is the true scale of a life.
George Eliot wrote with a moral realism that sees character formed through sustained effort, not instantaneous victories. Her novels often follow figures whose highest hopes exceed what their circumstances will bear: Dorothea Brooke, yearning to do good at scale; Tertius Lydgate, driven by scientific ambition; Maggie Tulliver, torn between impulse and duty. Their projects often falter, sometimes painfully, yet the narrative confers dignity precisely because they dared to align action with ideals. The grandeur lies not in public trophies but in the seriousness of the attempt and the sympathy it summons.
Set against a Victorian culture that prized progress and utility, the sentiment adds a human counterpoint. Success can be crude, mistaking luck or conformity for virtue. Perseverance dignifies the person by revealing steadiness under friction, humility before complexity, and loyalty to a purpose through time. Failure, then, is not a blot but a signature of moral reach: evidence that one has aimed beyond the safe circumference of habit.
Eliot’s own career required stout persistence and a willingness to risk censure, from adopting a male pen name to living unconventionally and laboring over demanding books. The counsel is not to worship failure, but to prefer a life large enough to court it. Better to be measured by the depth of one’s striving than by the tidy avoidance of loss, for perseverance discloses character, and character, not outcome, is the true scale of a life.
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| Topic | Perseverance |
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