Collection
Ambition quotes for people who actually have to do the work
Ambition has a public version and a private one. The public version is a announcement: the title, the number, the thing you tell people you are building. The private one is smaller and stranger — a preference for one kind of day over another, repeated until it becomes a life. The writers worth reading on this subject were almost all interested in the second one.
They were also unusually alert to how ambition goes wrong. Seneca kept returning to people who sailed hard in no particular direction. Shakespeare gave his most vaulting ambition to a man it destroyed. That is not a warning against wanting things; it is a warning that wanting is easy and aiming is not. A desire without a destination just makes you tired.
So this collection is short, and every line is traceable to the book it came from — no poster attributions, no lines that only exist on the internet. Take one. A sentence you carry through a week does more than a list you finish in ninety seconds.
7 source-cited lines
“When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
Letters to Lucilius, LXXI (Richard M. Gummere translation, 1920)“Our lack of confidence is not the result of difficulty; the difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.”
Letters to Lucilius, CIV (Richard M. Gummere translation, 1925)“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years.”
Meditations, IV.17 (George Long translation, 1862)“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Walden, 1854“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Self-Reliance, 1841“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
Julius Caesar, IV.3“I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.”
Macbeth, I.7
Keep one line
Tervezz idézetkártyát a böngésződben
Pick the sentence that made you pause and set it on a dawn sky in the Quote Studio. One line on your Lock Screen for a month will outwork a page of quotes you read once.
Az App Store-megjelenés előkészületbenA Napló