"However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure"
About this Quote
Longfellow is trying to pry “success” away from the glittering, public meaning it had in a rapidly commercializing 19th-century America and put it back under moral jurisdiction. The line is built like a corrective lens: “However things may seem” acknowledges the seduction of appearances, then the sentence snaps shut with a pair of clean inversions. Evil can win and still be evil; good can lose and still be good. It’s not a motivational poster so much as an attempt to keep conscience from being bullied by outcomes.
The subtext is a quiet protest against a culture that confuses visibility with virtue. Longfellow wrote in an era of national expansion, rising capitalism, and deep moral crises (including slavery and the lead-up to Civil War). In that atmosphere, “success” becomes an argument: proof that the winners deserved to win. Longfellow refuses that logic. He’s offering moral insulation for people who do the right thing and get punished for it, and he’s denying the powerful the comforting myth that triumph cleanses their methods.
What makes the line work is its grammar of steadiness. The parallelism (“no evil... and no good...”) sounds like a proverb, and the blunt negatives give it the feel of a rule you can carry in your pocket when the world starts gaslighting you. It’s also subtly demanding: if you can’t outsource ethics to results, you have to live with the harder task of judging actions on their own terms.
The subtext is a quiet protest against a culture that confuses visibility with virtue. Longfellow wrote in an era of national expansion, rising capitalism, and deep moral crises (including slavery and the lead-up to Civil War). In that atmosphere, “success” becomes an argument: proof that the winners deserved to win. Longfellow refuses that logic. He’s offering moral insulation for people who do the right thing and get punished for it, and he’s denying the powerful the comforting myth that triumph cleanses their methods.
What makes the line work is its grammar of steadiness. The parallelism (“no evil... and no good...”) sounds like a proverb, and the blunt negatives give it the feel of a rule you can carry in your pocket when the world starts gaslighting you. It’s also subtly demanding: if you can’t outsource ethics to results, you have to live with the harder task of judging actions on their own terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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