“A man that does not aim at raising to himself a great name, will never perform any great actions. And such as go carelessly on in the road of their professions suffer all the fatigues, without acquiring either the honour or recompense that naturally attend it.”

—  Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert

Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Son, 1726, p. 137

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A man that does not aim at raising to himself a great name, will never perform any great actions. And such as go carele…" by Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert?
Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert photo

Related quotes

Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“No man has a capacity for virtue who sacrifices honour for gain. Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert himself. That man becomes happy who follows Christ. There is no perfect gift without great suffering. Our triumphs and our pomps pass away;”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Source: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy, p. 91
Context: He who suffers time to slip away and does not grow in virtue the more one thinks about him the sadder one becomes. No man has a capacity for virtue who sacrifices honour for gain. Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert himself. That man becomes happy who follows Christ. There is no perfect gift without great suffering. Our triumphs and our pomps pass away; gluttony and sloth and enervating luxury have banished every virtue from the world; so that as it were wandering from its course our nature is subdued by habit. Now and henceforth it is meet that you cure yourself of laziness. The Master has said that sitting on down or lying under the quilts will not bring thee to fame. He who without it has frittered life away leaves no more trace of himself upon the earth than smoke does in the air or the foam on the water.

Joseph Strutt photo

“One great part of the joculator's profession was the teaching of bears, apes, horses, dogs, and other animals, to imitate the actions of men, to tumble, to dance, and to perform a variety of tricks, contrary to their nature; and sometimes he learned himself to counterfeit the gestures and articulations of the brutes.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 239
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Kuruvilla Pandikattu photo

“Death has been the great leveler/ Of all honour, glory and name./ None can take anything with them/ To their tomb! Death! The sobering fact/ Of all our yearnings and longings!/ “What does it profit a man …”/ If he cannot take any of the things/ To his grave.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 32.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Joshua Reynolds photo

“A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 3, delivered on December 14, 1770; vol. 1, p. 52.
Discourses on Art

Anatole France photo

“He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Il se flattait d'être sans préjugés, et cette prétention était à elle seule un gros préjugé.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

“[The Vijayanagar kings allowed] that every man may come and go, and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance, and without enquiring whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen. Great equity and justice is observed by all.”

Duarte Barbosa (1480–1545) Portuguese explorer and writer

The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. I, p. 202. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

Herbert Spencer photo

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist
Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XIX.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two
Context: The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.

David Hume photo

“It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master

“All political action aims at either preservation or change.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"What Is Political Philosophy" in The Journal of Politics, 19(3) (Aug. 1957) by the Southern Political Science Association, p. 343
Context: All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Related topics