Success Quote by George Eliot

Eliot rigs the definition of failure so it stops meaning what polite society wants it to mean. Not money lost, not status squandered, not even public disgrace, but a quieter, more corrosive collapse: the refusal to live up to what your own mind has already admitted is right. The line’s sharpness comes from its trapdoor logic. If you "know" better and still act worse, no external alibi can fully save you. Misfortune can be endured; self-betrayal has no such dignity.

The phrase "the best one knows" is doing heavy lifting. Eliot isn’t pretending moral truth is simple or universally shared. She’s conceding the limits of human certainty while insisting those limits don’t absolve you. You’re accountable to your highest available understanding, not to perfection. That’s a radical standard because it’s internal, portable, and impossible to outsource to church, husband, or crowd.

Context matters: Eliot wrote as Mary Ann Evans, a woman who took a male pen name and lived openly with George Henry Lewes outside legal marriage. Victorian England specialized in turning private life into a moral courtroom, especially for women. Her sentence reads like a counter-prosecutor’s brief: the real sin isn’t violating a social code; it’s violating your own tested convictions. It also doubles as an artistic manifesto. For a novelist obsessed with ethical complexity, being "true" isn’t sincerity-as-vibes. It’s disciplined attention to what you actually know about people, consequences, and your own motives, then refusing the comforting lie.