"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time"
About this Quote
Shaw doesn’t grant you the comforting fantasy of a flawless life; he offers something far more surgical: permission to be wrong, paired with a demand that you pay attention. As a dramatist who made careers out of exposing social vanity, he reframes “success” away from public applause and toward private accountability. Mistakes aren’t moral stains in this formulation; they’re data. The only unforgivable error is the one you refuse to learn from, because repetition signals not misfortune but character - ego, laziness, denial, or the stubborn need to protect a self-image.
The line works because it’s an insult disguised as encouragement. It flatters the listener with the idea that failure is inevitable (true, and soothing), then tightens the screws: you don’t get to romanticize your blunders as “part of the journey” if you keep reenacting them. Shaw’s comedy often targets institutions that normalize their own incompetence - genteel hypocrisies, bureaucratic rituals, sentimental politics. Read in that light, the quote is also a social critique: societies, like individuals, launder recurring mistakes into tradition. “We’ve always done it this way” becomes the oldest excuse in the book for doing it again.
Context matters: Shaw lived through seismic shifts - industrial modernity, world war, ideological upheaval - periods when repeated errors weren’t merely embarrassing, they were catastrophic. His metric of success is pragmatic and unsentimental: not purity, not genius, not luck, but a learning curve steep enough to change your behavior. That’s Shaw’s real punchline: growth is measurable, and repetition is the receipt.
The line works because it’s an insult disguised as encouragement. It flatters the listener with the idea that failure is inevitable (true, and soothing), then tightens the screws: you don’t get to romanticize your blunders as “part of the journey” if you keep reenacting them. Shaw’s comedy often targets institutions that normalize their own incompetence - genteel hypocrisies, bureaucratic rituals, sentimental politics. Read in that light, the quote is also a social critique: societies, like individuals, launder recurring mistakes into tradition. “We’ve always done it this way” becomes the oldest excuse in the book for doing it again.
Context matters: Shaw lived through seismic shifts - industrial modernity, world war, ideological upheaval - periods when repeated errors weren’t merely embarrassing, they were catastrophic. His metric of success is pragmatic and unsentimental: not purity, not genius, not luck, but a learning curve steep enough to change your behavior. That’s Shaw’s real punchline: growth is measurable, and repetition is the receipt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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