Ambition Quote by Leo Tolstoy

“With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time…

— Leo Tolstoy

“as well as over potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like sympathy, melancholia, and shame (the emotions given the most attention in literary criticism’s…

— Sianne Ngai

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally…

— Bertrand Russell

When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I…

— Bertrand Russell

Like most, I was a mix of good and bad, anger and protectiveness, kindness and pride. But right now, I had only strangled fear…

— Ann Aguirre

I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and…

— Sigmund Freud

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under…

— Erich Fromm

Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than…

— Laurence Sterne

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier…

— Honore de Balzac

The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others…

— Samuel Johnson

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound…

— George Eliot