Success Quote by William Shakespeare

Doubt, in Shakespeare's hands, isn't a private feeling; it's a saboteur with a job title. Calling doubts "traitors" yanks hesitation out of the realm of reasonable caution and into the moral and political language an Elizabethan audience would immediately feel in their bones: treason is not a mood, it's an offense. The line weaponizes that association to shame paralysis. You don't merely miss opportunities because you're unsure; you collaborate with the enemy inside your own gates.

The phrasing does a second, slyer thing. "Make us lose the good we oft might win" frames life as contested terrain, a drama of victories forfeited not to superior force but to self-betrayal. Shakespeare loves externalizing inner conflict this way; it turns psychology into plot. The rhythm tightens around "fearing to attempt", putting fear as the small, petty motive that gets the last word, as if the sentence itself enacts the trap: you end where you began, scared.

Context matters: the sentiment comes from Measure for Measure, a play obsessed with hypocrisy, moral posturing, and the gap between public virtue and private weakness. It's not a sunny motivational poster; it's a diagnosis of how authority and self-image can curdle into inaction. The intent is practical and theatrical: get a character moving, yes, but also indict the audience's appetite for safety dressed up as prudence. Shakespeare suggests the greatest losses aren't inflicted by villains; they're quietly signed away by the part of us that prefers not to find out what we're capable of.