"How success changes the opinion of men!"
About this Quote
Success is the great varnish: it doesn’t change the wood underneath, but it makes everyone suddenly admire the grain. Maria Edgeworth’s line lands with the clean sting of an observed truth, the kind a novelist earns by watching drawing rooms, dinner tables, and inheritance plots do their quiet moral accounting. The exclamation point matters. It’s not a gentle sigh; it’s a flash of recognition that opinion, so often sold as principle, is easily rerouted by status.
Edgeworth wrote in a world where reputation was a form of currency and “merit” was frequently retrofitted to match outcome. Her fiction anatomizes the social machinery of the Anglo-Irish gentry, where alliances are negotiated through manners and money, and where character is praised most loudly once it becomes convenient to do so. The quote’s intent isn’t to flatter success as deserved; it’s to expose how swiftly people reframe their judgments once the scoreboard changes. Yesterday’s risky ambition becomes today’s “vision.” The same trait that read as arrogance in a striver becomes “confidence” in a winner.
The subtext is darker: if men’s opinions swing so easily, then opinion isn’t a reliable measure of worth, only a weather vane for power. Edgeworth is also sketching a survival guide for the socially literate: understand that approval often follows victory, not virtue. That’s why the line still bites in modern culture, where a startup founder, an artist, or a politician can be dismissed as unserious right up until the moment they “make it” - and then, as if by magic, everyone claims they saw the genius all along.
Edgeworth wrote in a world where reputation was a form of currency and “merit” was frequently retrofitted to match outcome. Her fiction anatomizes the social machinery of the Anglo-Irish gentry, where alliances are negotiated through manners and money, and where character is praised most loudly once it becomes convenient to do so. The quote’s intent isn’t to flatter success as deserved; it’s to expose how swiftly people reframe their judgments once the scoreboard changes. Yesterday’s risky ambition becomes today’s “vision.” The same trait that read as arrogance in a striver becomes “confidence” in a winner.
The subtext is darker: if men’s opinions swing so easily, then opinion isn’t a reliable measure of worth, only a weather vane for power. Edgeworth is also sketching a survival guide for the socially literate: understand that approval often follows victory, not virtue. That’s why the line still bites in modern culture, where a startup founder, an artist, or a politician can be dismissed as unserious right up until the moment they “make it” - and then, as if by magic, everyone claims they saw the genius all along.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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