Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving.  'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers.  Before I died.'  So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.

Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible.  Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.

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.

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us, as God alone, he would not; Incarnate, he could and did.

Where, then, does happiness lie? In forgetfulness, not indulgence, of the self. In escape from sensual appetites, not in their satisfaction. We live in a dark, self-enclosed prison, which is all we see or know if our glance is fixed ever downward. To lift it upward, becoming aware of the wide, luminous universe outside - this alone is happiness. At its highest level, such happiness is the ecstasy that mystics have inadequately described. At more humdrum levels, it is human love; the delights and beauties of our dear earth, its colors and shapes and sounds; the enchantment of understanding and laughing, and all other exercise of such faculties as we possess; the marvel of the meaning of everything, fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded, but ever present.

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.

Only dead fish swim with the stream.