Success Quote by W. Clement Stone

Stone’s line is business gospel distilled to a single muscle: persistence. It’s not inspirational wallpaper so much as a worldview built for sales floors, self-help seminars, and the mid-century American promise that attitude can be trained like a bicep. “Achieved and maintained” does quiet extra work here. Plenty of motivational quotes fetishize the breakthrough; Stone insists the real game is retention. Success isn’t a finish line, it’s a subscription you renew by effort.

The phrasing is almost aggressively plain: “try and keep trying.” No mention of talent, privilege, timing, or systems. That omission is the subtext. For a businessman, especially one tied to the Positive Mental Attitude movement, the message is a kind of moral accounting: if you didn’t get there, you didn’t persist correctly. It’s empowering because it hands control back to the individual; it’s also convenient because it turns failure into a personal deficit rather than a structural one.

Context matters. Stone’s career sits in the long arc of American optimism-as-industry, where motivation becomes a product and resilience becomes a KPI. The quote sells a reliable, exportable ethic: you don’t need a new strategy, you need more attempts. That’s why it endures in corporate culture. It flatters the striver, reassures the already-successful that they earned it, and offers a simple ritual for anxiety: keep moving. The irony is that persistence is often necessary, but rarely sufficient; the line works because it refuses that complexity and replaces it with stamina you can measure.