Success Quote by John Ruskin

Perfection is the quiet killer in Ruskin's sentence, and he skewers it with the calm authority of a Victorian who watched ambition turn into moral theater. The line isn’t a pep talk about “lowering your standards.” It’s an argument against a particular kind of vanity: the belief that virtue is proven by reaching for the objectively “best” thing, regardless of whether you can actually do it well or sustain it.

Ruskin’s key move is replacing “best” with “successful effort,” a sly demotion of grand ideals in favor of lived practice. Success here isn’t glory; it’s durability. He’s making a case for work that fits the human body and psyche, not the fantasy self. “Easily within our power” reads almost heretical in cultures that romanticize struggle, but Ruskin isn’t praising laziness. He’s praising alignment: choosing tasks where your capacities and circumstances can generate real excellence rather than performative aspiration.

The subtext is social as much as personal. In an industrializing Britain addicted to status, “the best” often meant what signaled refinement, not what served a person or community. Ruskin, the art critic who defended craft and condemned mechanical production, is also defending a more honest standard: temperament and condition aren’t excuses; they’re the material facts any ethical life must take seriously.

It works because it’s both stern and freeing. Stern, in its insistence that self-knowledge is a duty. Freeing, in its permission to stop mistaking maximal difficulty for moral worth.