Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Victory here isn’t framed as a reward for brute force or divine favor, but as a psychological event: conquest begins the moment doubt stops running the campaign. Dryden compresses an entire moral theory into a single line, and the trick is how quietly coercive it is. “For they conquer” has the tone of a proven axiom, the kind of statement a court poet can deliver with the confidence of someone writing in an age obsessed with legitimacy and succession. The line doesn’t argue; it pronounces.

The verb “believe” does heavy lifting. It elevates mindset into strategy, implying that inner permission is the first logistics chain. But the subtext is sharper than today’s motivational posters: belief isn’t just inspirational, it’s political. In Restoration England, power was a performance as much as a possession. Monarchs returned, allegiances flipped, reputations were rebuilt in public. To “believe they can” is to project inevitability; it’s an instruction for how to occupy a room, a throne, a narrative.

Dryden, moving between regimes and reputations, understood that confidence can function like armor and propaganda at once. The line flatters the ambitious by making their desire sound like virtue, while also offering rulers a useful doctrine: if belief produces conquest, then cultivating belief (in oneself, in a cause, in a crown) becomes a tool of governance. It works because it’s both empowering and disciplinary, selling agency while quietly blaming failure on insufficient conviction. In a world where winners write history, Dryden suggests they also write themselves first.