Ambition seems a restless and solitary endeavor, stern, designing, pitiless and totally self-serving. Your potential only realized by solitary accomplishment, fingers stretched towards the next appealing enchantment of rank or fame or power.
Pigs and humans share this common trait – while a single hog or sow will often seem ambitious, and delve into all manner of industry and deviousness, put several of those swine in a group and the momentum of ambition changes. Even in the most inspiring circumstances or setting, the only thing upon which you can depend, after some brief period of initiative, is the group’s collective abandonment of large ambitions.
the Porcine Oracle
Additional information:
- “When pigs fly” is a scoff at aspirations.
- “Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.”
Albert Einstein, quoted in C. P. Snow, Variety of Men. - Can one function without the poison of ambition – answers from Jiddu Krishnamurti
- The complacency of ambition…