Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

This line is Bierce’s satirical “dictionary” definition of perseverance, written in the mordant, contrarian style for which he became famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bierce used such mock-definitions to puncture Victorian-era moral platitudes and the era’s self-help rhetoric that treated virtues like perseverance as inherently ennobling. In his view, persistence could just as easily be a mechanism by which ordinary talent forces its way to recognition, not through excellence but through sheer refusal to stop. The definition belongs to the broader project of The Devil’s Dictionary, a work shaped by Bierce’s career as a journalist, polemicist, and cultural skeptic.

Bierce reverses the conventional praise of perseverance by calling it “lowly” and linking it to “mediocrity” and “inglorious success.” The sting is not that perseverance never matters, but that persistence alone is morally and aesthetically neutral: it can propel the merely adequate to outcomes that look like “success” without deserving admiration. “Inglorious” suggests achievement stripped of honor—winning without merit, or arriving without distinction. The definition also mocks a culture that confuses endurance with excellence, implying that society often rewards the stubbornly average as readily as the truly gifted. It is a compact critique of merit, reputation, and the rhetoric of virtue.