Success Quote by Henry S. Haskins

There is a sly confession hiding inside Haskins's grit-and-sand imagery: self-control is exhausting, and the kind of respectability demanded by modern life can drain living of its flavor. "Clamping down" evokes industry hardware, not inner peace. This is discipline as a vise, not a virtue. Coming from a businessman, the metaphor feels especially pointed: the same mindset that tightens budgets and schedules also tightens the self, until the person doing the clamping starts to feel like an over-torqued bolt.

The line turns on "rough impulses". Haskins doesn’t romanticize chaos; he calls the impulses rough, not noble. Still, he argues for "occasional release" as a pressure valve. The subtext is less "be reckless" than "stop pretending you are a polished instrument all the time". It’s a pragmatic psychology before the term existed: repression isn’t moral strength if it produces a life that tastes like dust.

"Salt" does the heavy lifting. Salt stings; it preserves; it makes food worth eating. He’s praising the small, bodily, even slightly improper intensities that keep a person present: blunt honesty, laughter that’s too loud, desire, anger expressed cleanly instead of swallowed. Read in early-20th-century context, it pushes back against managerial propriety and the Protestant-clean model of character. Haskins is pitching a workplace-era heresy: the human animal needs sanctioned mess, or it will quietly turn brittle.