Success Quote by Charles de Secondat

Patience gets marketed as a virtue; Montesquieu treats it as a schedule.

“The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed” is less a fortune-cookie endorsement of perseverance than a cold lesson in political and personal strategy. The line turns success into a problem of calibrated expectation: not just working hard, but choosing an ambition whose timeline you can actually survive. That’s the subtext doing the heavy lifting. People don’t usually quit because the goal is impossible; they quit because the clock feels rigged, because the payoff arrives after morale, money, or social permission has run out.

Coming from an Enlightenment philosopher, the sentence smuggles in a worldview: outcomes are governed by systems, incentives, and durations, not divine favor or heroic willpower. Montesquieu is the guy who anatomized institutions and power as mechanisms. Here he applies the same mechanic’s eye to achievement. If you can estimate the horizon, you can ration resources, pace your ego, and avoid mistaking the normal lag of progress for failure. If you can’t, you become vulnerable to impatience, vanity, and bad bets - the kinds of human weaknesses that demagogues and grifters reliably exploit.

There’s a sly cynicism too: “most things” succeed not because they’re true or good, but because someone was disciplined enough to wait out the boredom and the backlash. The quote doesn’t romanticize endurance; it weaponizes it. Success, in this telling, is often a matter of correctly pricing time.