Daily Inspiration Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge

A second-class hotel is a perfect Muggeridge move: vivid, slightly comic, and faintly scolding. It’s not the grandeur of “a vale of tears,” and it’s not the uplift of “a gift.” It’s fluorescent lighting, thin walls, a grudging towel, and the nagging sense you’re overpaying for something you didn’t even choose. By borrowing St. Teresa of Avila, Muggeridge smuggles mysticism into modern consumer language: the spiritual life recast as an overnight stay in a place you shouldn’t get too attached to because it was never meant to be home.

The intent isn’t to romanticize suffering; it’s to puncture the modern obsession with comfort as a measure of meaning. “Second-class” does a lot of work. It implies not only inconvenience but a hierarchy we can’t game our way out of. You can complain at reception, upgrade your room, demand a better view - and still wake up with the same damp carpet and the same existential bill. That’s the subtext: human striving, especially the secular kind, keeps mistaking temporary arrangements for permanent realities.

Context matters. Muggeridge spent decades watching politics, celebrity, and ideology promise five-star salvation and deliver, at best, stained sheets. His late-life Christian turn sharpened his suspicion of worldly “progress” as a bait-and-switch. St. Teresa’s image becomes his critique of modern self-importance: you’re a traveler, not an owner. Act accordingly.