Success Quote by B. C. Forbes

Forbes slips a quiet act of defiance into a sentence that looks, at first glance, like wholesome encouragement. The pivot is the ellipsis: “done his level best...” pauses just long enough to let the reader supply everything the world usually counts instead - money, titles, headlines, applause. Then he yanks the measuring tape out of public hands and gives it back to the individual. Success becomes an internal ethic, not a social verdict.

The subtext is very Forbes: a journalist who chronicled business and built a brand around it, writing at a moment when industrial capitalism was turning achievement into a scoreboard. “The world may write him down a failure” is pointedly bureaucratic language. You can almost see the ledger entry, the judgment reduced to ink. Forbes isn’t pretending the world’s verdict is irrelevant; he’s acknowledging how official and brutal it can feel. But by framing it as something merely “written down,” he exposes it as recordkeeping, not truth.

There’s also an American moral muscle memory here: the Protestant-inflected idea that effort is character. Yet Forbes modernizes it for a media age. Public opinion is portrayed as a kind of publication decision - the crowd as editor, assigning a headline that may have little to do with the lived work.

It works because it flatters without lying. It doesn’t promise victory. It promises dignity: you can lose in public and still win privately, if the standard was honest exertion rather than performative success.