"The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing"
About this Quote
Desire gets recast here as a moral instrument, not a guilty pleasure. Holtby’s line is quietly combative: it challenges the tidy Victorian hangover that treats wanting as suspect and duty as the only respectable compass. By pairing “most wants” with “most worth,” she collapses a familiar binary - passion versus purpose - and suggests the overlap is not accidental but diagnostic. What you ache to do, she implies, may be where your talents, convictions, and the world’s unmet needs actually meet.
The sentence works because it’s probabilistic rather than preachy. “Probably” is the pressure valve: Holtby doesn’t romanticize every impulse as destiny; she just nudges the reader to notice a pattern we’re trained to ignore. That hedged confidence makes it feel earned, almost empirical, like advice from someone who’s watched too many smart people talk themselves out of meaningful work by calling it “self-indulgent.”
Context matters. Holtby was a feminist novelist and journalist writing in interwar Britain, a period when women’s ambitions were routinely framed as extracurricular to “real” life, and when social conscience was tangled with exhaustion, rationed opportunity, and the looming shadow of conflict. In that light, the quote reads less like a motivational poster and more like a permission slip with teeth: if you want to write, organize, report, agitate - the very wanting is evidence of responsibility, not rebellion.
Its subtext is bracing: your deepest longings might be inconvenient precisely because they matter.
The sentence works because it’s probabilistic rather than preachy. “Probably” is the pressure valve: Holtby doesn’t romanticize every impulse as destiny; she just nudges the reader to notice a pattern we’re trained to ignore. That hedged confidence makes it feel earned, almost empirical, like advice from someone who’s watched too many smart people talk themselves out of meaningful work by calling it “self-indulgent.”
Context matters. Holtby was a feminist novelist and journalist writing in interwar Britain, a period when women’s ambitions were routinely framed as extracurricular to “real” life, and when social conscience was tangled with exhaustion, rationed opportunity, and the looming shadow of conflict. In that light, the quote reads less like a motivational poster and more like a permission slip with teeth: if you want to write, organize, report, agitate - the very wanting is evidence of responsibility, not rebellion.
Its subtext is bracing: your deepest longings might be inconvenient precisely because they matter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Winifred Holtby, South Riding (1936) — frequently cited line: "The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing". |
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