The heights by great men reached and kept were not…
Quote
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 story behind this quote
The poem opens by hailing Saint Augustine for saying that of our vices “we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame”. Longfellow lists the rungs: low desire, “the revel of the ruddy wine”, “the strife for triumph more than truth”, the hardening of the heart. “We have not wings, we cannot soar; But we have feet to scale and climb By slow degrees.” Then comes the stanza, followed by the promise that, standing on what we have long borne, we may discern “A path to higher destinies”.
Longfellow published the poem in 1858 among the pieces he grouped as Birds of Passage, with The Courtship of Miles Standish. He had left his Harvard professorship a few years earlier to write full time, and was then the most widely read poet in America.
The stanza has outlived the poem. Copied into school notebooks and speeches, often without its title, it has become a standard reminder that lasting achievement is patient, unglamorous night work.
The source
The Ladder of St. Augustine, 1858
Checked word for word in the work itself.
More quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal.
Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
Author
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow taught modern languages at Harvard and wrote Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’. His poems were memorised in schools on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was the first…
Quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow