Life & Wisdom Quote by William Edward Hickson

An early Victorian self-help mantra disguised as a nursery rhyme, Hickson's line flatters failure by turning it into fuel. The rhythm does half the persuading: "try, try again" is a chant, not an argument. Its music makes persistence feel less like grim labor and more like moral common sense, the kind you can hand to a child and still mean for an adult with bills, bosses, and bruised pride.

Hickson was writing in a Britain obsessed with improvement: expanding schools, industrial discipline, religious earnestness, and the rising idea that character could be manufactured through habit. In that context, persistence isn't merely practical; it's a civic virtue. The subtext is quietly ideological: success is presumed attainable if the individual performs the correct interior work. Structural obstacles vanish behind the soothing promise that effort is the master key. That's why the phrase has stayed useful across centuries and class lines; it converts a messy world into a manageable personal project.

There's also a faint austerity to it. It offers no comfort, no "rest", no recalibration, no invitation to quit. The sentence is a tiny machine that keeps you moving, which is exactly its intent. It motivates by refusing to dignify failure as a verdict. Failures become rehearsal, not evidence.

Its durability comes from that double function: a pep talk and a moral command. You don't just keep going because you want to; you keep going because decent people do.