"It is only possible to succeed at second-rate……" — Malcolm Muggeridge
"It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable."
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Malcolm Muggeridge
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82 Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge has 82 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized…
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Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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Travel, of course, narrows the mind.
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Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as…
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This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare…
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Tranquilizers to overcome angst, pep pills to wake us up, life pills to ensure blissful sterility. I will lift up…
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There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or…
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Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
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What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.
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On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by…
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Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the…
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More Beautiful Quotes
This quote is filed under Beautiful Quotes,
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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I believe more in precision, when you have the capability, like when you see a mosquito fly and you're able…
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Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a…
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But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed…
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The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.
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I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in…
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Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of…
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Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about…
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Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
— Diane Ackerman
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