Moon and Sixpence Equally Important

"If you are determined to make great achievements in business, you must be able to grab the moon as well as snare the turtle. Attending to the tedious, meticulous details, and the computations of daily life are the snaring-the-turtle part, while the dedication to ideals and beliefs belong to the grasp-the-moon category."

"This is why a person, or an enterprise, must aspire to the heavens to grasp the moon and be able to descend to the depths to snare the turtle, and why the moon and sixpence are equally important."

"Ideals and beliefs are Maugham’s moon. A life of yearning for the moon and ignoring the sixpence at his feet cannot be beautiful. In fact, the adherence of Eastern philosophy to the middle way is identical to the dialectic, the Socratic method of debate, in which everything must find balance and all extremes are bigotry."