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Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
Vita Sackville-West
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Vita Sackville-West
Age: 70 †
Born: 1892
Born: March 9
Died: 1962
Died: June 2
Author
Biographer
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Knole House
Knole
Lady Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
Lady Nicolson
Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
V. Sackville-West
Hate
Latter
Better
Extremely
Would
Safety
Fail
Succeed
Gloriously
Failing
Safer
Probably
Modest
Rather
Ambitious
More quotes by Vita Sackville-West
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West
I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.
Vita Sackville-West
The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Vita Sackville-West
The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Vita Sackville-West
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
Vita Sackville-West
Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
Vita Sackville-West
Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.
Vita Sackville-West
Tools have their own integrity.
Vita Sackville-West
A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.
Vita Sackville-West
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Vita Sackville-West
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
Vita Sackville-West
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
Vita Sackville-West
Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.
Vita Sackville-West
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
Vita Sackville-West
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-West
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.
Vita Sackville-West
I miss you even more than I could have believed and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
Vita Sackville-West
that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!
Vita Sackville-West