Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Browning

Ambition is Browning's antidote to a Victorian world obsessed with outcomes, reputation, and moral bookkeeping. "The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life" flips the era's scoreboard logic: a life is measured less by trophies than by the audacity of its target. Browning doesn't romanticize failure; he relocates dignity to the posture of reaching. The line works because it quietly rewires the reader's shame. Missing the mark stops being evidence of smallness and becomes proof you were aiming at something worth missing.

"Try to be Shakespeare" is not a practical career note. It's a deliberately impossible standard, a provocation. Shakespeare here stands in for maximal imaginative range: language that can hold comedy and catastrophe, crowds and kings. Browning is telling artists (and not only artists) to choose a model so large it forces you to grow or break. There's bracing comedy in the command, too: he names the most canonical genius as if self-improvement were a matter of mere effort, then immediately undercuts the hubris with "leave the rest to fate!"

That last clause is the pressure valve. Browning, writing in a century of industrial acceleration and anxious self-making, acknowledges the brute arbitrariness of who gets heard, published, remembered. Fate means markets, patrons, illness, timing, taste. The subtext is almost therapeutic: control what you can control (the scale of your intention), refuse to confuse contingency with worth, and let posterity do what it does.