Success Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

A scientist admits defeat, but in the cool, clinical grammar of self-observation. Ostwald frames his collapse as a problem with a partial solution: rest can treat the symptoms, yet the deeper instrument is damaged. The key phrase is "once and for all" - not melodrama, but a stark recognition that the body’s limits have rewritten the terms of his vocation. For someone trained to trust repeatable results, irreversibility is the most unsettling conclusion.

The subtext is about a shifting contract between intellect and endurance. Experimental science in Ostwald’s era was still intensely manual and hours-heavy: tending apparatus, repeating trials, enduring tedium until fatigue became proof of seriousness. His earlier "capacity for carrying out experimental work until physically tired" reads like a badge of discipline - the ability to push past comfort as method. Losing it means losing a culturally prized form of scientific masculinity: the lab as a site where stamina signifies truth.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to the romantic myth of the tireless genius. Ostwald isn’t describing writer’s block or vague burnout; he’s naming an occupational injury. The sentence performs what it reports: measured, restrained, forced into clarity. It’s the rhetoric of a man recalibrating identity, turning from bench work toward roles where the mind can stay productive without the body taking the same toll. In a modern workplace obsessed with "grind", Ostwald’s line lands like an early, unsentimental memo: you can recover, and still never go back.