Success Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Failure, Sheridan suggests, isn’t a tragic accident so much as a paperwork error of the soul: you forgot to file the intention. Coming from an 18th-century playwright steeped in social comedy, the line carries the snap of a stage aside. It’s epigrammatic, tidy, and a little ruthless - the kind of sentence that flatters the audience into thinking they’ve just been told a hard truth, when they’ve really been handed a mirror.

The phrasing matters. “Surest” is a gambler’s word, a promise of odds, and it reframes failure as something predictable, even chosen. Sheridan doesn’t dwell on incompetence, bad luck, or structural barriers; he targets the pre-moment where people hide: the refusal to “determine.” That verb is colder than “want” and more forceful than “hope.” Determination implies decision, commitment, and the social risk of being seen trying. The subtext is that many of us prefer the aesthetic of potential to the vulnerability of effort - because effort can be judged.

In Sheridan’s world of manners and masks, indecision is its own performance. Not determining to succeed becomes a socially acceptable alibi: if you never declared the aim, you never technically lost. The line skewers that loophole. It’s motivational on the surface, but culturally it’s also a critique of genteel procrastination - the polite art of keeping your ambitions deniable.