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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Ambition

2 GAMSAT-style prompts on ambition. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task B · ReflectivePrompt 1 of 2

Consider the following comments on ambition.

  • Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

    Oscar Wilde

  • Far better it is to dare mighty things than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.

    Theodore Roosevelt

  • A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

    Robert Browning

  • Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

    Epicurus

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

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Task B · ReflectivePrompt 2 of 2

Consider the following comments on ambition.

  • Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

    Oscar Wilde

  • Far better it is to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

    Theodore Roosevelt

  • The danger of ambition is not that we fail to reach the summit, but that we forget why we ever wanted to climb.

  • A life without striving feels safe and tastes of nothing.

  • Some chase the goal because they love the thing, and some because they cannot bear to be still with themselves.

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A reflective thesis worth pursuing is that ambition reveals its true colour only when we ask what we are running towards and what we are running from. Open by honouring its vitality, the way a life of striving feels charged where a cautious life feels grey. Then turn inward to its shadow, the moment the climb becomes compulsive and the original reason for wanting it has quietly evaporated. A second move might distinguish ambition rooted in love of the work from ambition driven by an inability to sit with oneself. Caution: avoid the false comfort of dismissing ambition as mere vanity, since that pose is often just a way of forgiving ourselves for never having dared.

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More themes to practise

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