Success Quote by J. M. Barrie

Barrie slips a blade into the puffed-up idea of “success” and twists it: failure isn’t the opposite of excellence, it’s the entry fee. The line works because it flatters and indicts in the same breath. “We are all failures at least” opens like a bleak confession, almost democratic in its gloom. Then comes the sly pivot: “all the best of us are.” Suddenly failure isn’t just common; it’s selective, even aspirational. Barrie reframes inadequacy as evidence of seriousness, of having aimed beyond the easy target.

The subtext is moral and psychological. If you are among “the best,” you’re probably the person most aware of your own shortcomings. Not because you’re uniquely broken, but because you’re measuring yourself against something larger than applause: the work you meant to do, the person you meant to be, the ideal that keeps receding. That’s a very Barrie move. In Peter Pan and the broader Barrie universe, longing and loss are constant companions; the dream of staying perfect (or young, or untouched) is both seductive and impossible. Failure becomes a kind of adulthood: the knowledge that you can’t live up to the story you tell yourself, yet you keep writing it anyway.

Context matters, too. Barrie writes from a late-Victorian/Edwardian culture obsessed with respectability, progress, and public achievement. His sentence punctures that surface optimism with a private truth: the people worth admiring are often those most acquainted with defeat, because they’re the ones who dared to risk it.