Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“When a man is actually with God, and then sees what he has tried to do and in our terms done so marvellously. it amounts to something which is utterly inadequate. That's what I'm saying: that the steeple reaching up so far, far away, that Salisbury Cathedral has a beautiful steeple, but what is it compared with the sky into which it is reaching? It is in this comparison that one is aware of on the one hand the absurdity of our efforts, and on the other the inadequacy of them”
Interview with Bill Buckley
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Malcolm Muggeridge 37
English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist 1903–1990Related quotes
American Girl
Lyrics, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers (1974)
21 September 1854 (p. 256)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 33
Context: The most significant change in a man is not the change in his bodily strength or mental capacity. The most marvelous and far-reaching change which man ever undergoes is in his moral character and spiritual nature.
As quoted in Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book (1923) by Elbert Hubbard, p. 62
"?", journal entry (20 January 2003) at moby.com http://www.moby.com/journal/2003-01-20/.html
Letter to James F. Morton (10 February 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190
Context: I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)