Daily Inspiration Quote by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Ideals, for Montgomery, aren’t moral wallpaper; they’re the engine that keeps ordinary life from collapsing into mere management. The line pivots on a deliberately unfashionable claim: failure doesn’t discredit an ideal, it confirms why you need one. “Even if we never quite succeed” isn’t a resignation speech so much as a preemptive rebuttal to perfectionism. She’s building a humane ethic where striving matters more than spotless arrival, a stance that quietly protects readers from the shame economy that turns every shortfall into proof you’re unworthy.

The rhetoric works because it refuses the modern binary of either total achievement or cynical withdrawal. “Sorry business” is pointedly plain, almost domestic; it shrinks a life without aspiration into something small, transactional, dim. Then she snaps it open with “grand and great,” a double-barreled uplift that risks sentimentality but earns it through contrast. Montgomery’s genius is how she makes idealism feel practical: ideals aren’t abstract doctrines, they’re daily standards you “try to live up to,” implying repetition, routine, and the slow work of character.

Context matters here. As an educator and a writer whose worlds often place imaginative inner life against social constraint, Montgomery is arguing for aspiration as survival. In the early 20th century, especially for women navigating narrow scripts of respectability, “ideals” could be both shield and lever: a private compass that dignifies the mundane and a quiet critique of whatever society tells you to settle for. The subtext is bracing: don’t wait to be worthy before you reach; reaching is what makes you worthy.