Wit & Attitude Quote by Benjamin E. Mays

Ambition is usually framed as a ladder: you climb, you slip, you try again. Mays flips the moral math. Failure, he suggests, is survivable; aimlessness is the real catastrophe. The line works because it steals the sting from not “making it” and relocates it where it hurts more: the quiet, unglamorous erosion of a life spent without a chosen direction. In doing that, he offers a kind of tough compassion. Miss the mark and you still lived in relationship to a mark; you risked, learned, revised. Have no mark and you’re not even in the arena.

The subtext is educator-sharp: goals are not just productivity tools but identity-forming commitments. Mays is arguing for intention as a civic virtue, not a self-help hack. This is especially charged given his life and era. As a major Black educational leader in the Jim Crow 20th century and president of Morehouse College, he spoke to students whose aspirations were constantly being narrowed by law, violence, and social expectation. In that context, “no goal” isn’t neutral; it’s what oppression tries to manufacture - a shrinking of imagination until “realistic” becomes another word for surrendered.

Rhetorically, the sentence uses repetition like a classroom drumbeat: “the tragedy of life… the tragedy of life…” The parallelism makes the pivot feel inevitable. He isn’t romanticizing relentless achievement; he’s defending the dignity of striving itself, the insistence that a life should be authored, not merely endured.