Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in w...hich they are more ambitious to excel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creature...s are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe mathematically, predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by contr...ast, seems unbecomingly ambitious. He wants to understand the universe; to get behind phenomena and operation and solve the logically prior riddles of being, knowledge, and value. But the artist, and in particular the novelist, in his essence wishes neither to explain nor to control nor to understand the universe. He wants to make one of his own, and may even aspire to make it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God turned out. What's more, in the opinion of many readers of literature, he sometimes succeeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same r...oad, one of them has to give place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improveme...nt; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. His is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but for Christ, when he says, "Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." His is the ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth--who stand without fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way ...is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ...ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »