Success Quote by Jules Renard

Success doesn’t just buy comfort in Renard’s formulation; it buys amnesia. The line lands like a moral slap precisely because it refuses the usual success story arc - the one where achievement is framed as proof of virtue, hustle, even clarity. Renard, a dramatist with a satirist’s eye for self-deception, treats success as a kind of anesthesia: it dulls the nerves that once registered inequality as intolerable. The “danger” isn’t external backlash or envy; it’s internal drift, the quiet reprogramming of perception.

The phrase “makes us forget” is doing the real work. Forgetting is passive, almost innocent. No villain twirls a mustache; the reward system simply rewires attention. Once you’re insulated, injustice stops being a daily weather pattern and becomes “news,” an abstraction, a problem for committees. Renard’s “dreadful” sharpens the accusation: the world isn’t mildly unfair, it’s grotesquely skewed, and the grotesque part is how quickly the successful can normalize it.

Context matters. Renard wrote in France’s Third Republic, an era of bourgeois ascent, colonial extraction, and widening class tension - the kind of society where the salon could feel like the whole world if you had the right invitation. As a playwright, he understood how roles harden: today’s outsider becomes tomorrow’s gatekeeper, reciting the same lines about merit that once sounded like cruelty. The subtext is a warning to anyone “making it”: the real test isn’t whether you rise, but whether you keep your memory intact once the climb starts paying.