Love Quote by George Burns

Burns is selling a heresy in a country that treats achievement like a moral sacrament: maybe winning is overrated if it costs you your life. Coming from a comedian who survived vaudeville, radio, film, television, and the slow death of every format in between, the line lands less as self-help and more as showbiz street wisdom. He isn t romanticizing failure; he s mocking the idea that the scoreboard is the only proof you exist.

The phrasing does sly work. "Honestly think" signals a shrugging confession, not a sermon, which fits Burns s persona: the guy who tells you something bleak with a cigarette in his hand and a twinkle in his eye. "Failure" and "success" are treated as external verdicts, almost arbitrary, while "love" and "hate" are intimate and bodily. The subtext is that you can lose publicly and still keep your inner life intact; you can also win and become a stranger to yourself.

There s also an economic jab tucked inside. For most people, "success at something you hate" means stable money, status, and tolerable misery. Burns flips the bargain: security is not neutral; it extracts a daily fee in resentment. As a career comic, he knew the humiliations of bombing onstage and the hollowing effect of doing a bit that sells but deadens you. The intent isn t to glorify suffering; it s to argue that taste, joy, and agency are the real metrics, because they re the ones you have to live with after the applause stops.