Success Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Aphorisms like this are little machines: compact, confident, and designed to smuggle a moral program into your head in one clean sentence. Colton isn’t praising talent or luck; he’s canonizing stamina. “First requisite” is doing heavy lifting, demoting charm, genius, and social position to supporting roles. Success, in his framing, isn’t mysterious. It’s a bodily discipline: “physical and mental energies” yoked together, as if ambition requires both muscle and mind in harness.

The key pressure point is “one problem incessantly.” Not several problems, not a portfolio, not a balanced life. One. Incessantly. The language flirts with the monastic. It also carries a Protestant-work-ethic subtext common to early 19th-century British moral writing: virtue is focus, vice is distraction, and weariness is a character flaw you can (and should) overcome. “Without growing weary” quietly turns exhaustion into an ethical failure rather than a human limit.

That’s why the line still lands: it flatters the reader’s sense that success can be earned through willpower alone, a story that’s both motivating and politically convenient. It shifts structural realities - class, patronage, access - offstage, replacing them with an internal test of grit. Even the word “requisite” has a gatekeeping chill: if you don’t make it, you didn’t have the one essential ingredient.

Colton, a clergyman-turned-writer in a period obsessed with self-improvement maxims, packages an era’s anxiety about mobility into a tidy commandment: concentrate until you stop noticing the cost.