Life & Wisdom Quote by William R. Alger

A “ragged diagonal” is a small masterpiece of honesty: it refuses the comforting geometry we like to impose on moral life. Alger could have drawn a clean line, a straight march from obligation to fulfillment, but he gives us something scuffed, improvised, and visibly human. “Diagonal” implies we’re always crossing a grid someone else laid down - family, faith, nation, class - while “ragged” admits the crossing is uneven, snagged by compromise and backsliding. It’s not a heroic tug-of-war; it’s a daily negotiation that leaves frayed edges.

The pairing of “duty” and “desire” also matters because it avoids the usual Victorian moral binaries of virtue versus vice. Desire isn’t demonized; it’s treated as a legitimate vector, a force with direction. Duty isn’t sanctified either; it’s simply one pole of the map. Alger’s intent feels diagnostic rather than preachy: he’s naming the real shape of a life as it’s lived, not as it’s advertised in sermons or self-help maxims.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in 19th-century America, Alger stood in a culture newly obsessed with self-making and moral respectability, where public rectitude and private longing often had to coexist under the same roof. The “line of life” becomes a quiet critique of that era’s glossy narratives of progress. Your story isn’t a staircase; it’s a diagonal scrape across competing claims, and the friction is the point.