DON’T BE OVER-AMBITIOUS

 

          DON’T BE OVER-AMBITIOUS

Ambition is defined as desire, aspiration, drive, striving, force, enterprise, eagerness, zeal, longing, yearning, etc. It is a virtue, not a vice. It keeps a person active. No great task in the world can be accomplished without the adequate force of ambition.

To be ambitious is to be aspiring, assertive, enthusiastic, purposeful and dynamic.

Ambition cannot be dubbed as weakness unless it is disproportioned to the capacity  of the ambitious person. Italian author, philosopher and historian Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) said: “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.”

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) says in Henry VIII, Act 3, Sc.2: “Fling away ambition: By that sin fell the angels: how can man then,/The image of his Maker, hope to win by ‘t?”

Finally, the following viewpoint of the English novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton  (1803-73):

“Say what we will, we 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 our vivid and social enjoyments; it shuts our souls to our 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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G.R.Kanwal

16 June 2024