Success Quote by James Lane Allen

Allen’s line is the kind of moral sentence that looks like a stitched sampler until you notice the craft in its compression. “Conquered” does heavy lifting: doubt and fear aren’t solved, processed, or negotiated with; they’re framed as internal enemies in a private war. That martial verb matters because it turns a foggy emotional state into something you can ostensibly defeat. In a culture that prizes self-mastery, conquest is the most flattering metaphor we have.

The pivot is the last word. Failure isn’t treated as an external verdict delivered by the world; it’s recast as a symptom, downstream from two inner conditions. The subtext is bluntly American and quietly Protestant: the real battleground is the self, and misfortune is often a character problem in disguise. That worldview offers empowerment and a trap. If fear causes failure, then courage becomes a kind of universal currency; if you still fail, the implication is that you simply didn’t conquer hard enough.

Placed in Allen’s era - post-Civil War, industrializing, steeped in self-help optimism and emerging “mind-cure” currents - the line reads less like abstract wisdom than a cultural technology. It’s meant to discipline the reader into productivity and faith in agency at a moment when life was being reorganized by markets, machines, and social mobility myths. The rhetoric works because it’s both comforting and coercive: it hands you the key, then insists the lock is your fault.