Success Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan’s line flatters the ego with a promise of control: you don’t avoid failure by getting luckier, smarter, or better connected; you avoid it by choosing success hard enough. Coming from an 18th-century playwright steeped in social gamesmanship, it reads less like a business-school mantra and more like a stage direction for self-presentation. In Sheridan’s world, “determination” isn’t just private grit. It’s a public posture - the practiced certainty that persuades others to treat your outcome as inevitable.

The sentence works because it smuggles a tautology into a moral rule. If “to succeed” is defined as the thing you’re determined to do, then failure becomes almost a breach of etiquette: a lapse in will, a failure of performance. That’s classic Sheridan, whose comedies orbit hypocrisy, reputation, and the slippery gap between what people are and what they can convincingly appear to be. Determination here is not merely resolve; it’s narrative control.

The subtext is bluntly ideological. It shifts the burden of outcome onto the individual, neatly sidestepping the era’s rigid structures - class, patronage, gender, capital - that decided most fates long before anyone “determined” anything. The line’s appeal, then and now, is its seductive simplification: it turns contingency into character. As a piece of rhetoric, it’s brilliant; as a description of reality, it’s an aspirational fiction, polished enough to pass as common sense.