Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Strong
Immemorial
Ambition
Weakness
Mankind
More quotes by Vita Sackville-West
Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.
Vita Sackville-West
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
Vita Sackville-West
It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.
Vita Sackville-West
The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.
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
Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
Vita Sackville-West
The more one gardens, the more one learns And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
Vita Sackville-West
One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
Vita Sackville-West
I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.
Vita Sackville-West
all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.
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 the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
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
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
Vita Sackville-West
I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
Vita Sackville-West
A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.
Vita Sackville-West
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
Tools have their own integrity.
Vita Sackville-West
See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.
Vita Sackville-West
