Tao Te Ching
Ambition
Ambition normally involves trying to be something completely different from who and what we are. We fixate on a cultural, religious, or social value and try to become that way. Introverts in the West try to be like extroverts; extroverts in the East try to be like introverts. This is better than accepting our darker impulses and just going along with our most base biological and cultural instincts; but, it can quickly become an imprisoning set of rigid constructs. At this point though, it may become possible to transmute “ambition” into an inspiration based on experiencing and following our deeper basic goodness, our intrinsic wisdom.
Quotes (80)
“People were so consumed by their fears and ambitions, their desires. They were so busy planning and plotting their lives that they failed to live them.”
“Standing tiptoe we lose balance... pride has never brought a person greatness.”
“those who are capable of leading the world are those who have no ambition to use the world; those who are capable of sustaining fame are those who do nothing excessive to seek it.”
“I too must attempt a way by which I can raise myself above the ground, and soar triumphant through the lips of men.”
“Those who display themselves don’t shine for long. Those who flatter themselves don’t succeed for long. And those who parade themselves don’t lead for long”
“It is a great error to act superior to others.... anyone truly versed in any art will be clearly aware of his own deficiency; and therefore, his ambition being never satisfied, he ends by never being proud.”
“All phenomena are timelessly free in awakened mind, and so there is no phenomenon that is not free... no need now for anyone to make an effort to free them anew... Do not strive or try to achieve!”
“If you grasp the leftovers, you cannot hold to reality and will end up cut off from the source.”
“Whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight, they fight from ambition.”
“any one whose ambition so far misleads him as to call in strangers to aid in his defense, seeks to acquire that which he will not be able to hold.,,, to gratify a present desire, they think not of the evils which will in a short time result from it.”
“Painting and sculpture, labor and good faith have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better would it have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.”
“I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.”
“Glory and curiosity are the two scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.”
“Better to be first in something small than second in something great because the first move has a big advantage. Those who follow look like parrots.(#63)”
“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.”
“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.”
“Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action… a calm is not desirable for any situation in life.”
“Now let me dare to open wide the gate/Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod.”
“I’ve never bothered about getting ahead… What use is there in fame and fortune? In my hut, I listen to the evening rain and stretch my legs without a care in the world.”
“Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principals which direct them.”
“Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.”
“Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration.”
“if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile.”
“that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
“To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young ...”
“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”
“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.”
“We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”
“There was one who thought himself above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.”
“A victory meant the glory of a lifetime. the soul-stirring excitement together with the extreme beauty of the spectacle would seem to give a theme fitted to the heart's desire of a poet. But... the perfect expression of anything means that that thing has reached its culmination and is on the point of declining.”
“We know that our dreams are not realizable; but it is useful to have dreams in order to see them come to naught and to learn by their failure.”
“Rise above sectional interests and private ambitions... Pass from matter to spirit. Matter is diversity; spirit is light, life and unity.”
“A new step in the genesis of mind… A new domain of psychical expansion… waiting for us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself… a spirit of the earth.”
“The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love and all the other stings and pricks of life’s nettle-bed his ambitions had burnt upon him, he opened his eyes which had been wide open all the time but had seen only thoughts.”
“Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries,”
“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition.”
“Success—'the bitch-goddess, Success' in William James's phrase—demands strange sacrifices from those who worship her.”
“a person who seeks truth will never find it… a person who struggles cannot understand”
“When a civilization loses simplicity, it becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. People become slaves of external ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems.”
“It is our higher aspirations that make us immortal—not the permanence of an immutable separate soul, whose very sameness would exclude us from life and growth and from the infinite adventure of the spirit and condemn us forever to the prison of our own limitations.”
“Only a man who is capable of great passions is capable of great deeds and great accomplishments in the realm of the spirit. Only a man who has gone through the fire of suffering and despair, like Milarepa, could have accomplished the highest aim within a lifetime.”
“It is only in stopping halfway that individuality solidifies and shrinks to the notion of an egohood which contradicts or opposes universality... Individuality pursued to its end, i.e. realized to the fullness of its possibilities, is universality.”
“Schopenhauer drew a gloomy picture of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly determined laws of the universe... and the consequent desirability of reducing human vulnerability by reducing man himself... that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is foolishly ambitious, and grotesquely overestimates his capacities.”
“Spending all your life trying to achieve ordinary worldly goals is like trying to net fish in a dry riverbed. Clearly understanding this, make a firm decision not to allow your life to pursue such a useless course.”
“If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.”
“I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished... It's disgusting”
“If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off, and then you're not as good any more.”
“It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition... How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
“Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them.”
“In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, 'why don't I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,' and they abandon their values.”
“Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you're exactly the same.”
“Man’s greatest problem, the problem that has caused most of his agonies and miseries, has been his attempt to compensate for the narrowing of consciousness and the entrapment in the left-brain ego. His favorite method of compensation has been to seek out excitement. He feels most free in moments of conquest; so for the past three thousand years or so, most of the greatest man have led armies into their neighbors' territory, and turned order into chaos. This has plainly been a retrogressive step; the evolutionary urge has been defeating its own purpose.”
“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”
“externally empty, internally empty, and absolutely empty... there is nothing particularly to do do. There is nothing to work on, no one to make a reference point, nothing whatsoever.”
“Stop acting, stop speeding. Sit and do nothing. You should take pride in the fact that you have learned a very valuable message: you actually can survive beautifully by doing nothing.”
“I don’t really have any ambition, you know? I only have one thing I’d really like to see happen. I’d like to see mankind living together. Black, White, Chinese, everyone. That’s all.”
“The day you stop racing, is the day you win the race.”
“Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving... It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak.”
“They were all enamored with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!”
“Driven by the hunger for fame, we... have all kinds of small ambitions, such as impressing a girl, or big ambitions, such as landing on Mars. And time after time we end up in the water with nothing to hld on to and not knowing how to swim.”
“It's as important to know how to give up on dreams and ambitions as it is to know how to generate them.”
“The essence of bodhichitta is the heart that thinks, I alone, personally, will establish all sentient beings in the state of complete enlightenment.”
“Success breeds ambition... The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more... Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier.”
“Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids... Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”
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