“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”
The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 10.
Source: Good Poems for Hard Times
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 202
American poet 1807–1882Related quotes

“… he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.”
The Immortals (2009)

“The higher they climbed in their struggle to reach the top, the harder grew their toil. When one height had been mastered, a second opens and springs up before their aching sight.”
Quoque magis subiere iugo atque euadere nisi
erexere gradum, crescit labor. ardua supra
sese aperit fessis et nascitur altera moles.
Book III, line 528–530
Punica

Why Do Little Girls?
Song lyrics, Living Room Suite (1978)

Source: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 87.
Context: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.

On an old Song. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)