Motivational Quote by Lewis J. Bates

Luck here is less a gift than a test, and Bates rigs the exam so passivity fails. The poem opens with a folksy promise - good luck knocks once, at least, for every man - then immediately undercuts the comfort of that idea. “The flitting guest” is luck as something nervous and temporary, not a loyal patron. You don’t host it; you catch it. That’s why “wit” matters: not high-minded genius, but quickness, timing, the ability to recognize the knock for what it is before it fades back into the street.

The real target is the “loitering idler,” warmed by the fantasy that fortune will sit “beside his fire” like a domestic companion. Bates treats that posture as not merely lazy but delusional: waiting turns luck from an opportunity into a bedtime story. The moral pivot lands in the martial imagery - “storms at fortune’s gates” - which reframes success as siegecraft. Fortune has “gates” because it resists; desire must be “conquered,” not granted. Even “bold heart” is a kind of technology: courage as a practical tool for converting a moment into a life.

Contextually, it fits the 19th-century Anglo-American self-help worldview: providence exists, but it favors the alert and the audacious. Subtext: the myth of equal “one knock” flatters the reader while absolving society. If you missed your chance, Bates implies, it wasn’t the world; it was your reflexes. That’s the poem’s persuasive trick - it sells hustle as virtue and consolation as vice.