"It's the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles"
About this Quote
Bristol’s line is motivational writing at its most blunt-force: willpower as a battering ram. The phrasing is engineered to sound inevitable. “Constant and determined” isn’t inspiration; it’s industrial labor, repetition as destiny. Then come the verbs: “breaks down,” “sweeps away.” This isn’t self-improvement as contemplation, it’s conquest. Resistance is something to be crushed, obstacles something to be cleared like debris. The promise is simple and intoxicating: keep pushing and the world will yield.
The subtext is a distinctly early-20th-century faith in personal agency, the kind of American optimism that treats circumstance as negotiable. Bristol wrote in the ecosystem of self-help and sales psychology where persistence wasn’t just a virtue, it was a business strategy. In that context, “resistance” reads not only as inner doubt but as customers, competitors, gatekeepers, even the market itself. The sentence flatters the reader with a heroic role: you are the force of nature; the only real variable is your stamina.
What makes it work is its refusal to admit complexity. It offers a clean moral physics: effort equals outcome. That’s empowering, and also evasive. By turning obstacles into generic matter to be “swept away,” it skips the messy truth that some barriers are structural, some are ethical, some require redirection rather than demolition. Still, as rhetoric, it’s effective because it replaces anxiety with a procedure. When you don’t know what happens next, “constant effort” is a plan you can start today.
The subtext is a distinctly early-20th-century faith in personal agency, the kind of American optimism that treats circumstance as negotiable. Bristol wrote in the ecosystem of self-help and sales psychology where persistence wasn’t just a virtue, it was a business strategy. In that context, “resistance” reads not only as inner doubt but as customers, competitors, gatekeepers, even the market itself. The sentence flatters the reader with a heroic role: you are the force of nature; the only real variable is your stamina.
What makes it work is its refusal to admit complexity. It offers a clean moral physics: effort equals outcome. That’s empowering, and also evasive. By turning obstacles into generic matter to be “swept away,” it skips the messy truth that some barriers are structural, some are ethical, some require redirection rather than demolition. Still, as rhetoric, it’s effective because it replaces anxiety with a procedure. When you don’t know what happens next, “constant effort” is a plan you can start today.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
|---|---|
| Source | Claude M. Bristol — The Magic of Believing (1948); contains the line "It's the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles". |
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