Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

Ambition gets romanticized as altitude: the view, the spotlight, the clean silhouette against the sky. Thomas a Kempis flips that fantasy into a sober engineering problem. If you want height, you owe the earth a debt. “Loftier” isn’t just bigger; it’s riskier, more exposed to weather, time, and collapse. The line works because it quietly refuses the glamour of greatness and drags the conversation down to what nobody wants to post about: the unsexy, unseen work that makes permanence possible.

Kempis is writing from a medieval Christian sensibility where spiritual “building” means virtue, discipline, humility, and ordered inner life. The subtext is a critique of performative holiness and status: public grandeur without private formation is a tower built on sand. Foundations, in his world, are not merely preparation but self-abasement - confession, obedience, the daily grinding down of ego. The higher you climb, the more you must be anchored to something that isn’t applause.

There’s also a warning embedded in the metaphor. Loftiness can be read as pride, and pride is the structural flaw Christianity distrusts most. So the sentence flatters ambition only to booby-trap it: go ahead, build high, but understand the moral and psychological cost. In a culture that loves “overnight success,” Kempis offers a medieval corrective: what rises quickly, falls loudly; what lasts is mostly buried.