Success Quote by Graham Greene

Greene flips the self-help script with the quiet menace of someone who’s watched triumph curdle. “Success is more dangerous than failure” isn’t a contrarian aphorism; it’s a diagnosis. Failure is local. It bruises the ego, trims ambition, forces reassessment. Success, by contrast, expands your jurisdiction. It invites imitation, entitlement, surveillance, and dependence. It raises the stakes of your next move until even a small misstep becomes public property.

The second clause does the real work: “the ripples break over a wider coastline.” Greene chooses water not for prettiness but for accountability. Ripples are caused by a single stone, a small action, but their consequences travel. The “coastline” implies other people’s lives, institutions, reputations - whole geographies that didn’t consent to being part of your story. Success enlarges the perimeter of collateral damage. You don’t just fail alone anymore; you fail with an audience, with employees, lovers, readers, nations.

As a playwright and novelist steeped in espionage, Catholic guilt, and political fallout, Greene understood how status turns private choices into civic events. His characters often discover that being effective in the world doesn’t clarify morality; it complicates it. Success brings access, and access brings temptation: to rationalize, to use people, to mistake momentum for rightness. The line is a warning dressed as metaphor: when the coastline widens, so does your responsibility - and so does the blast radius when you pretend it doesn’t.