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Showing posts with label ambition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ambition. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Post #2763

Beware ambition; heaven is not reached with pride, but with submission.
—Thomas Middleton

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Post #2762

Ambition’s cradle oftenest is its grave.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Post #2434

Ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude.
—Sir W. Scott

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Post #2428

In the world there are only two ways of raising one's self, either by one's own industry or by the weakness of others.
—Jean de La Bruyère

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Post #1479

To wish is of little account; to succeed you must earnestly desire; and this desire must shorten thy sleep.
—Ovid

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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Post #1068

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.
—Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain

Monday, August 27, 2012

Post #1044

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
—Helen Keller

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Post #914

Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
—H.W. Shaw

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Post #866

Every private in the army carries a field marshal's baton in his knapsack.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Post #693

I never had the ambition to be something. I had the ambition to do something.
—Walter Cronkite

Monday, June 28, 2010

Post #268

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.
—Edmund Burke

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The Penalty of Leadership

In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man’s work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone – if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a -wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy – but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions – envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains – the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live — lives.
written by Theodore F. MacManus

A deadly viper once bit a hole snipe's hide; But 'twas the viper, not the snipe, that died.

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