"The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves"
About this Quote
Efficiency is doing more with less, but Burton is really selling something sharper: a moral hierarchy. In his formulation, success isn’t just a result; it’s a credential earned by a select minority disciplined enough to self-improve. That “efficient few” is doing heavy cultural work. It flatters the reader who already feels exceptional, and it quietly scolds everyone else as squanderers of time, talent, and duty.
The subtext is Protestant-adjacent without naming it: the disciplined self as both project and proof. Early modern England is full of new pressures that make this logic feel urgent - expanding commerce, social mobility that’s tantalizing but limited, and a world where identity is less inherited and more performed through conduct. Burton, writing in a period obsessed with the management of the inner life (melancholy, appetite, distraction), treats ambition and willpower as technologies: tools you can cultivate to engineer a life.
Notice what’s missing: luck, patronage, family, plague, war, land, exclusion. Burton’s “few” aren’t merely productive; they’re purified of circumstance. That omission is the rhetorical trick that makes the line bracing and dangerous. It offers a simple, portable explanation for success that travels well across centuries because it’s comforting: if outcomes reflect inner strength, the world is legible.
At the same time, Burton’s writerly background matters. This isn’t a CEO’s hustle poster; it’s a moral sentence shaped like advice, built to sting. It turns “develop themselves” into a duty, and turns duty into destiny.
The subtext is Protestant-adjacent without naming it: the disciplined self as both project and proof. Early modern England is full of new pressures that make this logic feel urgent - expanding commerce, social mobility that’s tantalizing but limited, and a world where identity is less inherited and more performed through conduct. Burton, writing in a period obsessed with the management of the inner life (melancholy, appetite, distraction), treats ambition and willpower as technologies: tools you can cultivate to engineer a life.
Notice what’s missing: luck, patronage, family, plague, war, land, exclusion. Burton’s “few” aren’t merely productive; they’re purified of circumstance. That omission is the rhetorical trick that makes the line bracing and dangerous. It offers a simple, portable explanation for success that travels well across centuries because it’s comforting: if outcomes reflect inner strength, the world is legible.
At the same time, Burton’s writerly background matters. This isn’t a CEO’s hustle poster; it’s a moral sentence shaped like advice, built to sting. It turns “develop themselves” into a duty, and turns duty into destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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