Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Failure is easy to narrate after the fact; trying is what scrambles the story. Shakespeare’s line, spare as a verdict, flips our usual moral bookkeeping. We like deeds because they’re legible: a completed act can be judged, praised, punished, turned into history. An attempt is messier. It’s half-light, motive tangled with incompetence, courage indistinguishable from desperation. That ambiguity is the confounding part.

Shakespeare is a dramatist of intentions that leak. His characters don’t just do things; they rehearse themselves into disaster, talk themselves into bravery, rationalize themselves into betrayal. The “attempt” is where identity is forged and exposed, because it’s the moment a person claims agency and risks being revealed as smaller than their self-image. A deed can be chalked up to fate, politics, or accident. An attempt is personal.

The subtext carries a sting: we’re unnerved not simply by unsuccessful action, but by the visibility of striving. Watching someone reach and miss confronts us with our own stalled ambitions. It also threatens social order. Attempts test boundaries - of class, power, morality - before any outcome justifies the disruption. That’s why would-be usurpers, lovers, and avengers in Shakespeare so often trigger panic before they succeed or fail; the trying itself destabilizes the room.

Contextually, in a world preoccupied with providence and reputation, an attempt is a public wager against both. It’s the scene where certainty cracks, and Shakespeare, ever the cool anatomist of human pretense, knows that crack is where the drama lives.