Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Interpretation
Success can undermine ambition, but true nobility lies in the struggle against inevitable fate.
This quote reflects the idea that while ambition may thrive in situations of success and ease, the most profound and moving experiences come from witnessing the struggles and defeats of those who fight valiantly against fate. Such battles against insurmountable odds reveal the depth of human spirit and vulnerability, often serving as powerful narratives that resonate through literature and real life alike.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of resilience.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
If anyone feels his sins, let him come at once, straight, direct, not merely to church, or to the sacrament, or to repentance, or to prayer, but to Christ Himself.
Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.
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