The Measure of True Success

By | October 18, 2025

“I may, I suppose, regard myself or pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets — that’s fame.

I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue — that’s success.

Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions — that’s pleasure.

It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time — that’s fulfilment.

Yet I say to you — and I beg you to believe me — multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing — less than nothing, a positive impediment — measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge