“And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.”
May-Day
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882Related quotes
“Yet, with this ruined Old World for a nest,
Worm-eaten through and through”
A Word With a Skylark, lines 5-6.
“The lucky man is honored …
But earnest striving wins no praise at all.”
Source: Elegies, Lines 169-170, as translated by Dorothea Wender.
“Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain.”
In "Karl Barth's Conception of God" (1952) http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol2/520102BarthsConceptionOfGod.pdf by Martin Luther King, Jr., King cites this as a statement of Barth's in The Epistle to the Romans, p. 91, but it does not actually appear in the 1933 translation of Edwin Hoskyns. It may be a paraphrase of some of Barth's ideas which were incorrectly cited.
Disputed
“We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.”
As quoted by Violet Bonham-Carter in Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), according to The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 155 ISBN 0300107986
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches
The testament of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, translated by (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1998), ch. 12.
"The Conqueror Worm" (1843), st. 5.
“What we were striving for was a kind of modified form of communism.”
Reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 52, indicating that President Ronald Reagan had attributed this quote to Ickes in December 1981.
Misattributed