Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes About Ambition
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Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, -it steals away the freshness of life, -it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, -it shuts our souls to our own youth, -and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.
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Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.
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Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.
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Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.
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Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.
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Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.
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Ambition has no rest.
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The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- Born: May 25, 1803
- Died: January 18, 1873
- Occupation: Novelist
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