Ten Quotes on Vision and Ambition

Vision and ambition. Two words with terminal sounds that rhyme nicely. The former "conceives" while the latter "achieves"; action words which, again, have a nice ring to them but therein ends their resonance (at least to me). The first one is decidedly "yang"--positive, upward-seeking. As for the other, well, ambition has an uplifting nature but it has an ugly side that is "yin"--consuming, ironically downward-seeking and, therefore, negative.

My recent posts in two of my other blogs contain elements of both. My brief post on Davos, where I traced the origin of what is now called the "World Economic Forum," (the 38th annual conference being attended by 27 heads of state, among others, is ongoing) is meant as a tribute to a single individual's strategic vision. On the other hand, my post on the shocking $7 billion loss announced recently by Societe Generale (SocGen) is meant as a slap on the wrist of a young rouge trader driven by overweening ambition to get ahead fast in the competitive world of banking.

The following quotes hopefully capture in elegant prose what my own thoughts are about vision and ambition:

On Vision

To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan... believe... act! -Alfred A. Montapert

* * *

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision. -Ayn Rand

* * *

The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going. -Anonymous

* * *

Vision is the art of seeing the invisible. -Jonathan Swift

* * *

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. -Carl Jung

On Ambition

No one does anything from a single motive. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

* * *

Ambition can creep as well as soar. -Edmund Burke

* * *

When ability exceeds ambition, or ambition exceeds ability, the likelihood of success is limited. -Ralph Half

* * *

In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. -Maya Angelou

* * *

Man's many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weigh him down. -Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba

(Photo credits: Stockxpert.com)

Quotes From "Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life"...Part 1

It seems I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to divine what my true calling in life is. When I was much younger, this search had led me to astrology, palm reading, numerology, runes and tea leaves. I have a small collection of books devoted to these esoteric arts, no kidding.

I was about to turn next to tarot cards when I stumbled upon this book by Gregg Levoy. I consider it my best find on the subject of calling and destiny. Let me share with you the passages that I marked in this book and see if you can relate to the wisdom contained therein. Actually, by selecting these quotes, I am not doing justice to Gregg Levoy’s book. If I only had my way, I’d quote everything here! That’s a measure of just how much I liked this book, which I bought on December 30, 1997. Here goes:

On “Breakthroughs”:

“The great breakthroughs in our lives in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements.”

On “Passion”:

“Passion—or as Plato said, Eros (Love)—moves instinctively toward the creation of form.”

On “Calls” and “Callings”:

“Calls are essentially questions. They aren’t questions you necessarily need to answer outright; they are questions to which you need to respond, expose yourself, and kneel before.”

* * *

“Callings keep surfacing until we deal with them.”

* * *

“Generally, people won’t pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so.”

* * *

The truest calls seem not only to keep coming back but also to make their way to us through many different channels, so we can use this as a starting point.”

On “Enemies”:

“…our ‘enemies’—whatever forces thwart us—provide us with the true tests of our spirit.”

On “Stage Fright”:

“..stage fright only happens to people who have something they desperately want to say, otherwise they don’t have enough at stake to warrant being scared.”

On “Paradox”:

“If you can hold paradox…you can hold tremendous energy within you and be a force for mediation to the world.”

On “Dreams”:

“To ignore dreams is to hide the sculptor’s tools, to tear out pages from our own stories, to drive with our tailpipes dragging on the ground. If we ignore dreams we cut ourselves off from the place from which calls emanate.”

* * *

“They’re meaning machines, and they never lie.”

* * *

“Dreams tell us how we really feel about something.”

On “Sickness”:

“ …sickness is often the soul’s way of indicating that something is missing in our lives.”

On “Chance”:

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”

On “Synchronicities”:

“Synchronicities are minor miracles, little mysteries that point to a bigger one, perhaps a central one, of which we are a part.”

On “Impulses”:

“ If you feel two impulses, go with the one that has the greatest risk for you. It will be by far the most interesting.”

On “Journeys”:

“A geographical journey is symbolic of an inner journey for which we long.”

* * *

“Spiritual journeys, like stories, have at their core a central question—as do our lives—and if we understand not even the answers but merely the questions that animate our own journeys, we’ve understood a lot.”

* * *

“At a deep level, we all associate journeying with circularity.”

On “Fear”:

“…the thing we most fear is the thing we must do.”

* * *

“Wherever our most primal fears reside….chnaces are good that beneath them lie gems of wisdom and maybe a vision or a calling.”

* * *

“Wherever you stumble—on a tree root, on a rock, on fear or shame or vulnerability, on someone else’s words, on the truth—dig there.”

On “Life”:

“…the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives. The way we live our lives also depends on the questions we ask.”

On “Opposites” and “Contrasts”:

“..after big openings often come big closings. After highs, lows. After breakthroughs, breakdowns.”

* * *

“Intense fights often follow intense intimacy.”

On “Vision”:

“Vision, if it is anything, is your life story in action.”


--Gregg Levoy

Quotes From “The Soul’s Code: In Search Of Character And Calling”

My inner journey started in the Summer of 1967, just before I entered college. On one otherwise forgettable day that summer, a religious missionary found her way into our sleepy barrio and gifted my mother with a slim blue-covered pamphlet entitled “Why Are You Here?”

That question has bothered me ever since. I still am today, after years of disappointing on and off research and self-study on a subject that I know now has no precise answers. This book by James Hillman, which I acquired in July 1999, helped a lot in my soul-search. The marked sentences and passages in my copy of this book which are shown below are the lessons I learned which I would like to share:

On the “Acorn Theory”:

“…the ‘acorn theory’ …holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”

On “Calling”:

“Each person enters the world called.”

* * *

“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim.”

* * *

“…calling seems closest during the years through eight and then again during adolescence…”


On “Character”:

“You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians before your birth.”


On “Soul”:

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.”

On “Childhood”:

“…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way.”

On “Image”:

“…you and I and every single person is born with a defining image.”

On “Compensation Theory”:

“…the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities.”

On “Vision”:

“…as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.”

On “Biographies”:

“They give our lives an imaginary dimension.”

On “Fate”:

“How curious that life can be foreordained and yet not foretold.”

* * *
“Catching the sly winks of fate is a reflective act. It is an act of thought…”

On “Accidents”:

“The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much as order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.”

On “Success”:

“…the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”

On “Love Maps”:

“The theory of love maps suggests that environmental conditioning determines the object of your desire.”

* * *

“…long before your true love walks past you in a classroom, at a shopping mall, or in the office, you have already constructed some basic elements of your ideal sweetheart.”

On “Platonic Myth”:

“…a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment..”

On “Code of the Soul”:

“…’in late adulthood’, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.”

On “Intuition”:

“Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning.”

-James Hillman