Life & Wisdom Quote by Leon Uris

“Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it” has the blunt fatalism of someone who’s spent a career writing about high-stakes ideals colliding with real bodies. Leon Uris, a novelist of war, nation-building, and survival under pressure, isn’t offering a motivational poster; he’s puncturing the comforting myth that effort is a guarantee. The sentence is built like a casualty report: “usually” makes failure statistical, “a good part” makes it sizeable, and “not making it” dodges melodrama in favor of the understatement you hear from veterans and hardened insiders.

The intent feels less like discouragement than inoculation. Uris is telling you that trying is not the heroic climax; it’s the entry fee. The subtext is that modern culture loves the clean narrative arc - grit, struggle, victory - because it’s emotionally efficient and marketable. Uris insists on the messy middle where outcomes depend on timing, resources, luck, and systems larger than any individual. That “people trying it” phrasing matters: the focus is collective, almost anonymous, suggesting how quickly personal ambition becomes a crowd and then, inevitably, a thinning.

In context, it reads like a writer’s credo shaped by twentieth-century catastrophes: wars where courage didn’t guarantee survival, political movements where sacrifice was common and triumph uneven. The line works because it refuses consolation while quietly honoring the attempt. Failure isn’t framed as shame; it’s framed as expected terrain. The only real choice is whether you enter it anyway.