Success Quote by Andre Maurois

Maurois is quietly skewering the ego’s favorite hobby: rewriting disappointment as destiny. The line turns on a sly conditional - “If men could” - that implies they usually can’t, because self-knowledge requires exactly what pride resists: an “open mind” about our own motives. The sting arrives in the reversal. What we “failed to obtain” is assumed to be what we wanted; Maurois suggests that assumption is often a psychological cover story, a way to preserve the self as tragically thwarted rather than simply misdirected, bored, or playing out someone else’s script.

The sentence works because it treats desire as unstable and socially contaminated. “The things” aren’t named; they’re placeholders for the standard trophies - career prestige, romantic conquest, status, the right kind of life. By leaving them generic, Maurois makes the mechanism universal without sounding sentimental: we confuse wanting with wanting-to-have-been-the-type-of-person-who-gets-it. Failure hurts less when it can be framed as the world’s error, not our own mistaken craving.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Maurois lived through an era when traditional certainties (class roles, nationalism, moral codes) were being stress-tested by modernity and war. His work often favors lucid psychological observation over grand ideology. Here he’s offering a bourgeois heresy: maybe the missed promotion, the unattained marriage, the unrealized ambition wasn’t stolen from you; maybe it was a borrowed desire that collapsed under contact with reality.

The intent isn’t to soothe but to demystify. Disappointment becomes a diagnostic tool: not proof you were denied, but evidence you may have been chasing the wrong story.