Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Stanley

Stanley writes like a man trying to pin down a spiritual event with the blunt tools of grammar. The sentence lurches forward on repetition ("on scenery... on scenery... on scenery"), as if the mind keeps returning to the same sight and still can not quite believe it. That piling up is the point: he is not describing a view so much as recreating the experience of being overwhelmed by it, the way awe short-circuits eloquence. The awkwardness reads less like clumsiness than honesty under pressure.

The key move is the doubling: strange and grand are kept separate until the final fuse, "at once so strange and so grand". Sublime landscapes are supposed to be legible in one register - beautiful, majestic, reassuringly ordered. Stanley insists on a mixed signal, a holiness that is not comfortable. "Strange" smuggles in disorientation, even dread; "grand" keeps the experience from collapsing into mere fear. The subtext is theological: creation as both invitation and rebuke, a reminder of scale, otherness, and limits. Nature is not a postcard; it is a confrontation.

Context matters. As a Victorian Anglican priest and later a prominent churchman, Stanley lived in an age that loved to catalogue the world - geology, archaeology, travel writing - while also worrying about what those discoveries did to faith. His line balances on that fault line. The final turn, "probably never shall again", is not just traveler's bragging. It is a memento mori: a recognition that certain revelations are singular, unrepeatable, and that the self who saw them will never quite be the same.