Category: Ambition
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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The passage of years has made of a man on the make a man of wisdom. He stands on a street corner, a spectator of the passing scene. An old flame from his cocky youth passes by. Gloria Mundi sees him but without acknowledgement. The old man thinks to himself, "What did I ever see…
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Do You Seek Name and Fame?
The world's too shallow a pond to justify one's wanting to 'make a splash.'
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Too Shallow a Pond
The world's too shallow a pond to justify one's wanting to make a splash in it.
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How Ambitious Ought One Be?
Ambitious enough to secure the platform from which to reach beyond ambition.
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On Making a Splash and Making a Dent
Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, had "made quite a splash." The metaphor is unfortunately double-edged. When an object hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it would have…
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On ‘Making It’
One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters. He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds…
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Ambition versus Aspiration
Ambition is driven by the ego and serves it. It is good within limits, and for a time, the time it takes to secure the worldly wherewithal that permits an advance to something better than mere ambition, aspiration. Aspiration aims beyond the ego to its source. Both target self-improvement, but the selves are different. …
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The Made Man
He who is ever on the make will never have it made. He will never be a 'made man.' There is a time to strive, and a time to be. Is the universe trying to get somewhere? It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic? If you think you have a Maker, is he…
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Ambitious For What?
Here is an old man who is still ambitious. For what? For more land and loot, for more experiences that scatter and degrade? For the repetition of the same old pleasures to whose repetition a lifetime has already been devoted if not wasted? Does this world offer even one thing that is a worthy object of…
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Ambition and Age
Lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But here is an old man still driven by his old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature. Is he not a fool? For his old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age. His…
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Ambition and Happiness
Viewed in one way, ambition is a good thing, and its absence in people, especially in the young, we consider to be a defect. Without ambition, there can be no realization of one's potential. Happiness is connected with the latter. We are happy when we are active in pursuit of choice-worthy goals that we in…
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Socialism and Ambition
Like a commitment to socialism, worldly ambition is natural and appropriate in the young, but a sign of foolishness in the old.
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Ambition and Disillusion
The young, astride their steeds of ambition, should gallop boldly into the fray. But the old should know when to quit the game and dismount into dis-illusion. Homo ludens, when sapient, knows when to become de-luded.
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Emerson on Thoreau’s Lack of Ambition
Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry from June, 1851: Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of [the] huckleberry party. (Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart of Emerson's Journals, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, p. 256.) As a former student of engineering, I am…
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Abandoning Ambition, Let Us Repair to the Portico. . .
Thanks to open library stacks, I stumbled across the epigrams of Martial a while back. (Therein lies an argument for open stacks.) Marcus Valerius Martialis was so-named because he was born on March 1. He first saw the light of day circa A.D. 40 at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis. So far to me he seems…