Rockefeller said it to Orison Swett Marden, who printed it in How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves (Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1901), on page 207, as his answer to what had most helped him succeed in business. One wrinkle: the book reads “I do not think there is any other quality” — the “that” in the popular wording was added later.
“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance” John D. Rockefeller, quoted in Orison Swett Marden, How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves (Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1901), 207. The book reads: "It was early training, and the fact that I was willing to persevere. I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature." The widely circulated form inserts "that" after "I do not think" and drops the final sentence.
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Provenance
The source
Source
How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves
Recorded by
Orison Swett Marden, editor of Success
Published
Lothrop Publishing Company, Boston, 1901
Located at
Chapter XII, “John D. Rockefeller” — the “Perseverance” section, p. 207
When I asked Mr. Rockefeller what he considers has most helped him in obtaining success in business, he answered: “It was early training, and the fact that I was willing to persevere. I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”
1901 · p. 207
Transcribed from the 1901 text. Note the book reads “I do not think there is” — without the “that” carried by most modern versions — and that Marden’s report of his own interview is the only witness to the exchange.
Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ credits the line to How They Succeeded (1901) by Orison Swett Marden — the starting point for the check.
The 1901 book bears that out: Project Gutenberg’s full text ↗ carries the passage under the heading “Perseverance,” at the page marker for p. 207, and its title page records the copyright as 1901, Lothrop Publishing Company, Boston.
Rockefeller’s own memoir, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909) ↗, is often assumed to be the source; a search of its full text finds no occurrence of the word “perseverance,” so the 1901 interview stands as the documented origin.
Marden ↗ founded Success magazine in 1897 and assembled the book from interviews first run there, which the book’s own introductory note confirms.
Quote Investigator ↗ returns no article on this quote, so there is no specialist finding that conflicts with the 1901 citation.
✓Public domain
The line was first published in How They Succeeded (Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1901) — the copyright notice is printed in the book itself. A work published in the United States in 1901 is long out of copyright, which is why Project Gutenberg ↗ can host the complete text. No translation is involved: Rockefeller spoke English and the words are as first printed.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What drifted
Rockefeller is one of the internet’s biggest fake-quote magnets, so it is worth saying plainly: this one is real, and it has a page number. What has drifted is the wording and the paperwork around it.
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The wordingQuote aggregators variant
BrainyQuote ↗ prints “I do not think that there is any other quality…” and LibQuotes ↗ carries the same inserted “that” while citing the correct 1901 book — so the altered wording now travels alongside a real citation. The book itself ↗ has no “that.”
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The citationGoodreads and most repost sites unsourced
Goodreads ↗ reproduces the book’s wording correctly but attaches no source at all, and flags that its quotes are community-submitted and unverified. A genuine quote circulating with no paper trail is how a genuine quote eventually becomes a doubted one.
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The bookRandom Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909) not the source
Because it is Rockefeller’s only well-known book, his memoir is often assumed to be where the line lives. Searching the full 1909 text ↗ returns no occurrence of the word “perseverance.”
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The trimDaily quote feeds truncated
The version that circulates almost always stops at “…the quality of perseverance,” cutting the sentence Rockefeller actually finished on — “It overcomes almost everything, even nature” — which is part of the sourced entry ↗.
✓The line is Rockefeller’s, spoken to Orison Swett Marden and printed on page 207 of How They Succeeded (1901) ↗ — where it reads “I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”
Context
Why this one is real when so many Rockefeller quotes are not
Orison Swett Marden founded Success magazine in 1897 and built a career out of getting famous men to explain themselves. How They Succeeded gathered those interviews into a book in 1901 — and its Rockefeller chapter is unusually candid, quoting him at length on his boyhood ledger, the ten cents he gave to foreign missions, and his advice to young men to stay out of debt.
The perseverance line arrives at the very end of that chapter, under a one-word heading, as the answer to a single direct question: what had most helped him succeed in business. Rockefeller began with “early training,” then gave the sentence that has outlived everything else in the chapter. Marden’s own portrait a few pages earlier notes that Rockefeller avoided publicity as most men would the plague — which makes the on-the-record answer the rare thing it is.
It overcomes almost everything, even nature.
The sentence people usually skip
Almost every repost stops at “…the quality of perseverance.” The book does not. The next sentence — “It overcomes almost everything, even nature” — is the part that actually says something arguable: not that persistence helps, but that it can beat the hand you were dealt.
It also matters that this is Rockefeller talking about himself in 1901, at the height of his fame and after he had stopped running Standard Oil day to day in 1897. He is not offering a maxim for other people so much as naming the trait he wanted credited for his own fortune.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1839–1937 · American oil magnate and philanthropist
John Davison Rockefeller built Standard Oil into the company that defined American industrial scale, and became the era’s most famous rich man — and its most famously private one. He stepped back from active management of Standard Oil in 1897 and spent his later decades directing enormous sums into medicine, education and scientific research. Marden’s own chapter describes a careful, deliberate, publicity-averse man, which is part of why a single sourced sentence from him is worth more than the hundreds of unsourced ones now circulating under his name.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Orison Swett Marden, How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves (Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1901), 207.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-do-not-think-that-there-is-any-other-quality-so-essential/