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Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

Wilfred Owen

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Wilfred Owen
Age: 25 †
Born: 1893
Born: March 18
Died: 1918
Died: November 4
Poet
Writer
Oswestry
Shropshire
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen
Owen
Defined
Hits
Ambition
Nose
Number
Hitting
Numbers
Ambitious
Funny
Receiving
May
Noses
Willingness
Receive

More quotes by Wilfred Owen

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Happy are men who yet before they are killed Can let their veins run cold.
Wilfred Owen
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Whatever mourns when many leave these shores: Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Wilfred Owen
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I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law
Wilfred Owen
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My subject is war, and the pity of war.
Wilfred Owen
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After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
Wilfred Owen
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I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts and rusted every bayonet with His tears.
Wilfred Owen
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For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping may something have been left, Which must die now.
Wilfred Owen
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My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country.
Wilfred Owen
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I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?
Wilfred Owen
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Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.
Wilfred Owen
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Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death.
Wilfred Owen
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The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death.
Wilfred Owen
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The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
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So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
Wilfred Owen
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This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Wilfred Owen
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Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds, But here the thing's best left at home with friends.
Wilfred Owen
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I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
Wilfred Owen
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Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.
Wilfred Owen
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I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
Wilfred Owen
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I tried to peg out soldierly,--no use! One dies of war like any old disease.
Wilfred Owen