Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the futility of self-indulgence, likening it to an empty pursuit.
Malcolm Muggeridge's quote critiques the nature of self-gratification, suggesting that such pursuits ultimately lead to emptiness and disillusionment. By referencing Pascal's metaphor of 'licking the earth,' he emphasizes that indulging in superficial pleasures may seem satisfying at first, but in retrospect, they reveal a lack of true fulfillment and meaning in life.
Themes
Self-GratificationFantasyFutilityPleasureFulfillment
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of meaningful pursuits, this quote can serve to highlight the difference between pleasure and true satisfaction.
More from Malcolm Muggeridge
All quotes βThis life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
Similar quotes
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
Yann MartelRead
I would say it simply: No one can give that which he doesn't personally possess, which means we cannot transmit the Holy Spirit in an effective way, render the Spirit perceptible, if we ourselves aren't close to the Spirit.
Pope Benedict XviRead
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
Rudyard KiplingRead
Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
Since no daily responses are given from heaven, and the Scriptures are the only record in which God has been pleased to consign His truth to perpetual remembrance, the full authority which they ought to possess with the faithful is not recognized unless they are believed to have come from heaven as directly as if God had been heard giving utterance to them.
John CalvinRead