Success Quote by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Aldrich turns “failure” into a moral diagnosis, then narrows the culprit list to a single category: the people who never tried. The line’s punch comes from its aggressive exclusivity - “and they alone” - which reads less like comfort and more like a verdict. It isn’t the usual rah-rah reassurance that effort guarantees success; it’s a harder claim that the only unforgivable loss is opting out.

As a poet of late-19th-century America, Aldrich is writing into a culture busy mythologizing self-making: the Protestant work ethic, the post-Civil War push for industriousness, the emerging idea that character can be engineered through will. The aphorism fits that moment’s appetite for clean, quotable moral architecture. Its syntax is almost legalistic: a rule, a carve-out, a final assignment of blame. “Striven” (not merely “tried”) adds a Calvinist edge: struggle is the proof of seriousness, and seriousness is the proof of virtue.

The subtext is social as much as personal. This kind of line flatters the doers and shames the hesitant, which makes it useful as cultural self-policing: if you’re stuck, it’s your fault; if you’re defeated, at least you earned your dignity by fighting. It’s bracing, but also conveniently silent about structural limits - poverty, illness, exclusion - that can make striving costly or impossible. That tension is why it still circulates: it sells agency in six words, even as it risks turning compassion into a side note.