"To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step toward doing. But if we do not wish to do a thing it becomes impossible"
About this Quote
Southey slips a moral engine into a neat bit of psychological common sense: the battle is won (or lost) before it ever reaches the hands. “Wishing” here isn’t daydreaming; it’s resolve posing as desire, a mental commitment that makes action feel not only possible but inevitable. The line’s first clause flatters the reader’s agency - you are not a victim of circumstance, you are the author of your own momentum - while quietly setting a trap: if you’re stuck, it’s because you didn’t want it enough.
That’s the subtextual bite. Southey turns reluctance into a kind of veto power. “Impossible” doesn’t mean the laws of physics intervene; it means the self sabotages, inflates obstacles, invents reasons, delays until the chance evaporates. It’s an early, poetic sketch of what we’d now call motivation as infrastructure: attention, energy, and follow-through are rationed by what the mind has decided matters.
Context matters because Southey sits in the Romantic era, when interior life became a serious force in public thinking. Romantic writers elevated will, imagination, and moral character as drivers of history and personal destiny. Yet Southey was also a man whose politics traveled from youthful radicalism to establishment conservatism, and you can hear that shift: the aphorism doubles as a discipline sermon. It dignifies “the resolute mind” and implicitly scolds the unwilling. The genius of the phrasing is its simplicity - it reads like encouragement, but it also polices the boundary between those who act and those who “choose” not to, even when the choice may be knotted up with fear, poverty, or exhaustion.
That’s the subtextual bite. Southey turns reluctance into a kind of veto power. “Impossible” doesn’t mean the laws of physics intervene; it means the self sabotages, inflates obstacles, invents reasons, delays until the chance evaporates. It’s an early, poetic sketch of what we’d now call motivation as infrastructure: attention, energy, and follow-through are rationed by what the mind has decided matters.
Context matters because Southey sits in the Romantic era, when interior life became a serious force in public thinking. Romantic writers elevated will, imagination, and moral character as drivers of history and personal destiny. Yet Southey was also a man whose politics traveled from youthful radicalism to establishment conservatism, and you can hear that shift: the aphorism doubles as a discipline sermon. It dignifies “the resolute mind” and implicitly scolds the unwilling. The genius of the phrasing is its simplicity - it reads like encouragement, but it also polices the boundary between those who act and those who “choose” not to, even when the choice may be knotted up with fear, poverty, or exhaustion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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