The arena paragraph, line by line

Almost nobody meets this paragraph as a paragraph. It arrives cropped, and the crop always stops in the same place — “victory nor defeat” — because that is where the applause is. What follows is another seven sentences, and they change the thing considerably. This page walks all of it, in Roosevelt's order, in the text Scribner printed in 1910.

The paragraph, entire

This is paragraph 10 of 39, a quarter of the way into an 8,800-word lecture. It follows two paragraphs on the temptations peculiar to educated and comfortable people, and is followed immediately by warm praise of French literature and arms. Nothing on the page sets it off.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a soldier.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, Sorbonne, 23 April 1910 · 1910 Scribner text

The arithmetic of what gets quoted

Nine sentences, 385 words. The first is 29 words and clears the ground. The second is 112 words, six semicolons and ten relative clauses, and is what people mean by “the man in the arena”. Together they are 141 words, 37 per cent, and in circulation they are the whole paragraph. Those 141 hand out credit; the unquoted 244 are the bill. The arena sentence is abstract enough that any reader can install himself in it; the second half is specific enough to catch people.

One word to watch throughout: actually. It appears four times — actually in the arena, does actually strive, actually bear the brunt, not what they actually are — and each time it prises a real thing away from a professed one. It is the hinge of the passage, and a plain word, which is the point.

“It is not the critic who counts”

The negative opening. Roosevelt begins by subtracting. Before there is an arena, or a man in it, someone is being removed from consideration — which is why the passage is so easily used as a weapon. The person removed is a figure he has spent two paragraphs building: the man of trained intellect settled into the pose of the sneerer, not anyone with an opinion. That distinction is page 07.

“Counts” is a bookkeeping word. Modern ears hear “the critic doesn't matter”, a claim about worth. Read it against the clause that answers it — the credit belongs, an accounting term — and the metaphor resolves into a ledger. To count is to be entered in the tally when someone totals up who did the thing. Roosevelt does not say the critic is worthless or wrong, only that his name does not go in that column. That is a claim about attribution, not value, and most misuses depend on reading it the other way.

“Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” Two kinds of criticism, given separate grammar: one points at a failure that happened, the other at a counterfactual. Both are cheap to produce and both are frequently correct, which is why Roosevelt argues on other ground — he never says the critic is mistaken, only that he is not in the tally. Note also that the object of criticism is dignified in the naming: not the weak man but the strong man, not the amateur but the doer of deeds. The comparison is rigged in advance.

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena”

Why “actually”. Without the adverb the clause describes a location; with it, it asserts presence. Anyone can be near an arena, adjacent to it, an authority on it. Roosevelt's man is in it, now, with the consequences live.

Where the arena comes from. The metaphor is Roman, and more literal than it looks. English “arena” comes from Latin harena, whose first meaning is simply sand. Lewis and Short's lexicon gives the primary sense as “sand”, then “the place of combat in the amphitheatre (strewn with sand), the arena”, then a figurative use for the scene of any contest. The word entered English in the 1620s meaning “place of combat” and had its figurative sense by 1814. The standard explanation for the sand, given by the Online Etymology Dictionary, is that it soaked up blood.

Two caveats. The origin of harena is unsettled — etymonline calls it “of uncertain origin, perhaps from Etruscan”, Lewis and Short record a Sabine fasena — and the blood-absorption gloss is a lexicographers' explanation, not a Roman's. The chain of meaning is not in doubt: sand, then the floor of the killing-ground, then any place where the outcome is real.

“Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” The first thing said about the man is not what he achieves but what he looks like, and it is not flattering. Marred means spoiled, damaged. Three nouns in ascending seriousness, joined by and rather than commas so each must be taken separately: dust is unavoidable, sweat is effort, blood is injury.

“Who strives valiantly.” Three words, the shortest clause in the sentence, a bar of rest after the face. Strives, not succeeds. Valiantly is deliberately archaic, out of chivalric romance rather than 1910 political speech, and it plants the vocabulary the paragraph ends on: Hotspur's “valiant end”.

“Who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” The load-bearing claim. Every other clause describes a man; this one states a law. Error is not a risk of effort, it is a property of it — not rarely, not usually, but none without it. Grant that and the rest follows mechanically: any standard that disqualifies the erring disqualifies everyone who acts, leaving the tally to people who did nothing. It is also the clause most often skipped by those using the quotation to excuse a particular failure, since it defends error as a category and says nothing about whether a given error was avoidable. Note the pairing, too: doing the wrong thing and not doing enough of the right one are different failures, both admitted.

“But who does actually strive to do the deeds.” The but is the guardrail: having conceded error, Roosevelt withdraws the excuse he seemed to offer. Erring is forgiven only inside real striving. The emphatic auxiliary — does strive rather than strives — is a man insisting against an imagined objection, and “the deeds” are the definite ones the critic was commenting on.

“Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions.” The register changes: after sweat and error, two abstract plurals, and the verb is knows, which makes them experiences rather than achievements. This answers the cynic of the preceding paragraph, whom Roosevelt described as posing as having “outgrown emotions and beliefs”. The arena is not only where a man gets hurt; it is the only place certain feelings are available at all.

“Who spends himself in a worthy cause.” The most-ignored word in the passage is worthy. Roosevelt is not indifferent to what the man is doing; the credit is conditional on the cause deserving the spending. Strip the word out and the paragraph becomes a celebration of intensity as such — which is how it is often deployed, and which would make it useless for telling a builder from an arsonist. Note also spends himself.

“Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement.” Best case first, and unambiguous. Roosevelt does not hedge it or subordinate it to the effort that produced it. Winning is the good outcome, and any reading of this paragraph as indifferent between winning and losing has to explain the clause away.

“And who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” The symmetry is exact and the ranking explicit — at the best against at the worst, the failure marked twice as the inferior branch. What is preserved in defeat is not the outcome but the manner. Six of these words, fails while daring greatly, were lifted out in 2012 to title a bestselling book on vulnerability and shame, which gave the passage its second life; that is page 09. In the original they name the consolation prize.

“So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” The sting, and three moves in one clause. The reward is relocated: what the man gains is not victory but a place — a standing, an arrangement in memory. Shall never be is the language of oath, not of argument. And the exile is defined by an absence rather than a fault: the cold and timid are accused of nothing, they simply have no result. To know neither victory nor defeat sounds like safety and is written as annihilation.

The two-thirds nobody quotes

Here the applause line arrives, the crop happens, and almost every reader stops. Roosevelt does not. The next 244 words work through the alternatives to the arena one figure at a time — pointed at the room he was standing in, since his Sorbonne audience was the French academic establishment: men of cultivated taste and cloistered life, professionally.

“Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.” The charge is not refinement but refinement allowed to run on into incapacity. Fastidiousness carries its older sense of squeamish over-nicety, and permits assigns blame precisely: taste is fine, the man is culpable for what he lets it become. “The rough work of a workaday world” is deliberately unlovely, planted in a sentence about people with beautiful vocabularies.

“Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows.” The framing clause matters. This is not a claim that solitude is bad but a claim about what self-government requires: the work of a republic happens in rooms with other people in them, so a life organised around avoiding contact has a small field of usefulness — small, notably, not zero. Cloistered files a scholar's study beside a monk's cell; shrink makes the withdrawal an aversion rather than a vocation.

“Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day.” The escalation: the fastidious man had a small field, the derider has less room still. Two verbs again — deride is open mockery, slight the quieter thing, treating work as beneath notice, and far harder to catch yourself doing. “Bear the brunt of the day” has a Biblical ring and moves the picture from the gladiator to the ordinary worker.

“Nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are.” The sharpest line in the paragraph. The excuse-maker comes last because he is the hardest of the four to dismiss: he agrees with everything, and he would like to take action. Two words spring the trap. Always converts a reasonable complaint into a permanent condition — a man whose conditions are never right, at any time, which tells you conditions were never the problem. And actually, in its last appearance, closes the argument: conditions as they actually are is not an obstacle to action, it is the definition of the only place action can happen.

“The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.” Three ways of doing nothing, chosen because they look nothing like each other. The cynic does nothing out of disbelief — Roosevelt defined him a paragraph earlier as the man “to whom good and evil are as one”. The fop does nothing out of vanity: a dandy, absorbed in his own dress and manner. The voluptuary does nothing out of appetite, being given over to luxury and sensual pleasure. History cannot tell the three apart, because it records only the doing, and each scores zero.

“There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.” The insult is in the noun: not man but being, which withholds the category. Tepid is worse than “cold and timid”, because tepid is what you call a thing that failed to be either. The verb is again knows — the charge against the uninvolved life is consistently that it does not get to find things out. The closing image is the passage's one piece of pure grandiosity.

“Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength.” This should end the argument that Roosevelt glorifies failure. He ranks the outcomes out loud: success is well, failure is also well, though not so well. And the consolation is fenced — given only that — by two tests: the venture must have been noble, and everything the man had must have gone into it. The passage is read as saying that trying is what matters. It says trying is what matters if you lose.

The Hotspur ending

The paragraph does not finish on a maxim. It finishes on a literary allusion, delivered without explanation, to two figures from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

Hotspur is Henry Percy, the young northern lord whose rebellion drives the play and who dies at Shrewsbury in Act V. He is impulsive, quarrelsome, funny, frequently wrong and entirely without calculation — which is what “he of the many errors and the valiant end” compresses. He is the arena man: the errors stipulated, the ending stipulated, the memory fond regardless.

The other figure is the courtier Hotspur describes in Act I, scene iii. Roosevelt does not name him because he cannot — the man has no name and appears only inside a speech. Hotspur is explaining why he refused to hand over his prisoners: fresh off the field, bloody and exhausted, he was approached by a perfumed lord with a scent-box who complained about the corpses carried past. The contempt culminates here:

…This villainous saltpeter should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless Earth,
Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for these vile guns
He would himself have been a soldier.— Hotspur, Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, scene 3 (Folger Shakespeare Library edition)

Roosevelt's version compresses that and changes one word, these to the. The line is a quotation inside a quotation — Hotspur is mimicking the courtier — so the sentiment is the courtier's and the sneer is Hotspur's, and Roosevelt borrows both at once. The courtier is Shakespeare's popinjay, Hotspur's own word a few lines earlier, and he is exactly the excuse-maker of two sentences before. Gunpowder is the condition. He would have been a soldier in a world without guns, which is to say in no world.

He is also the paragraph's fop, given a face. The catalogue named cynic, fop and voluptuary in the abstract; the last sentence produces one of them out of English literature, perfumed, holding a scent-box, standing next to the dead.

The allusion cuts against the usual picture of the passage. At the Sorbonne, Roosevelt ends his most physical paragraph by asking a hall of French scholars to recognise an unnamed minor character from an English history play — a move that works only on an educated audience, and that flatters them in the act of rebuking them. He does the same in the next paragraph, praising France for proving that “a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft”, and later tells the same room “I pay all homage to intellect”. This is not an attack on learning but on one thing learning can turn into.

Which text is this? The ten variants

Two versions of the paragraph circulate widely and they are not identical. This site follows African and European Addresses (Scribner, 1910), the first book publication, digitised as Project Gutenberg ebook 13930. Nearly every quotation online, English Wikisource included, follows a slightly different reading — ten differences, each a word or a word-order. None changes the argument; several change the rhythm.

A warning follows from that last row. A quotation reading “a valiant soldier”, or “who errs, who comes short”, is downstream of the variant and not of the 1910 printing — which covers most of what circulates in posters, anthologies and speeches. A page that reads the paragraph word by word has to say which words it is reading. These are the Scribner ones.

Sources for this page

• African and European Addresses — Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910 (Project Gutenberg ebook 13930) · The canonical text for every Roosevelt quotation here. Establishes the wording; it does not establish delivery, being a printed book rather than a record of the room.
• The complete speech, on this site — the 1910 text in full, with the arena paragraph anchored · Lets the paragraph be read in its place in the argument, which is the point of this page.
• Citizenship in a Republic — English Wikisource · The widely-copied online version and the source of the ten variant readings tabulated above. Useful precisely as the thing to compare against.
• Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, scene 3 — Folger Shakespeare Library · The verified text of Hotspur's popinjay speech, with through-line numbering. The “vile guns” lines are 65–66.
• The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Act 1, Scene 3 — MIT Shakespeare (Moby text) · A second, independently edited text of the same scene, checked against the Folger reading.
• Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary: harena — Perseus Digital Library, Tufts · Establishes the sense chain from “sand” to “the place of combat in the amphitheatre (strewn with sand)” to any scene of contest. Does not settle the word's ultimate origin.
• arena (n.) — Online Etymology Dictionary · Dates the English word to the 1620s and the figurative sense to 1814, and gives the standard blood-absorption explanation for the sand. Calls the origin of harena uncertain, perhaps Etruscan.