Success Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a parlor epigram, then quietly turns the knife. It’s built on a tidy symmetry - two tragedies, two outcomes - that promises moral clarity. The trick is that he refuses the comforting hierarchy we expect. Losing what you want is obviously painful; gaining it is supposed to be the happy ending. Shaw collapses that fairytale distinction and, in doing so, skewers the Victorian (and still very modern) faith that desire is a reliable compass.

The intent isn’t to preach asceticism so much as to expose appetite as a staging device: we organize our lives around wanting, because wanting gives narrative shape. “Heart’s desire” sounds sacred, but Shaw treats it as a dramatic prop that can misfire. If you lose it, you’re left with grief and the humiliation of powerlessness. If you gain it, you’re left with something arguably worse for a dramatist: the curtain drops. Achievement can reveal the desire was smaller than the life you sacrificed to pursue it, or that it carried hidden costs, obligations, boredom, or guilt. Fulfillment doesn’t end longing; it often detonates it.

In context, this is Shaw the social critic, suspicious of romantic and capitalist mythologies that promise salvation through acquisition - of love, status, success. As a playwright, he also understands that satisfaction is inert onstage; conflict drives action. The subtext is bracing: the real tragedy isn’t misfortune, it’s the mismatch between what we think will redeem us and what actually can. Shaw makes disappointment democratic. Even the winners don’t get to win cleanly.