"However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure"
About this Quote
The line overturns the scoreboard by which most people tally their lives. Appearances, outcomes, applause, and profit often look like success, but if they rest on harm, deceit, or cruelty, they are not success at all. Conversely, efforts grounded in courage, kindness, or justice can be rejected, defeated, or ridiculed, yet they are not failures. The moral quality of the act, not its immediate result, is the measure.
That perspective resists a brutal calculus of ends justifying means. It says the means are already the end in miniature: an evil means has already failed, and a good means has already succeeded. It also offers steadiness amid reversals. A whistleblower who loses a job, a reformer whose campaign falls short, a parent who chooses honesty over advantage may look defeated in the short term, but they have not failed in the deeper sense Longfellow insists on.
The poet spent his career urging readers to prize character over spectacle. In poems like A Psalm of Life and The Ladder of St. Augustine, he links true achievement to integrity and perseverance rather than to trophies. Writing in a 19th-century culture wrestling with slavery, civil war, and industrial wealth, he saw how often evil could look triumphant and how often good appeared weak. He answered with a moral realism that trusts both conscience and time: what is evil cannot finally be called success; what is good cannot finally be called failure.
Applied to the present, the line punctures the glamour of metrics. Followers, market share, and headlines say little about whether something is worth doing. It restores dignity to quiet, principled work and denies victory to shortcuts that harm others. Success, then, is not what works but what is right; failure is not what falls short but what betrays the good. That redefinition frees ambition to aim at virtue, and it protects hope when outcomes disappoint.
That perspective resists a brutal calculus of ends justifying means. It says the means are already the end in miniature: an evil means has already failed, and a good means has already succeeded. It also offers steadiness amid reversals. A whistleblower who loses a job, a reformer whose campaign falls short, a parent who chooses honesty over advantage may look defeated in the short term, but they have not failed in the deeper sense Longfellow insists on.
The poet spent his career urging readers to prize character over spectacle. In poems like A Psalm of Life and The Ladder of St. Augustine, he links true achievement to integrity and perseverance rather than to trophies. Writing in a 19th-century culture wrestling with slavery, civil war, and industrial wealth, he saw how often evil could look triumphant and how often good appeared weak. He answered with a moral realism that trusts both conscience and time: what is evil cannot finally be called success; what is good cannot finally be called failure.
Applied to the present, the line punctures the glamour of metrics. Followers, market share, and headlines say little about whether something is worth doing. It restores dignity to quiet, principled work and denies victory to shortcuts that harm others. Success, then, is not what works but what is right; failure is not what falls short but what betrays the good. That redefinition frees ambition to aim at virtue, and it protects hope when outcomes disappoint.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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