Ambition Quotes - Page 3

I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I were a widow!” Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.

The possibility of the dream gives strength.

I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.

Whatever you dream of is a possibility.

A man is not a tree'...If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Self-reliance and self-learning are your greatest assets.

If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.

Let your action manifest your thought, your belief and your passion.

We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

Do your best, and your best will be growing better.

The greatest energy must be use for work.

I thrice presented him a kingly crown. Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

The world looks very different to me now at twenty. I have outgrown my early opinions and ideals with my short dresses, just as Mrs. Walton said we would. Now the critics can say 'Thou waitest till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart.

There's more to a person than flesh. Judge others by the sum of their soul and you'll see that beauty is a force of light that radiates from the inside out.

Women show men beauty in things beyond their ambitions. Women tell men to stop and smell the roses.

Somewhere between what is...and what can be...begs the question...what are you meant to be?

The only thing to know is how to use your neuroses.

There is no friendship between kings.

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person).

I did it again. Lying guilty in a hotel room for a woman I will fail for.

His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.

...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...

The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.

Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness.

Popularity makes no sense If your fame is a shame.

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

Ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put

I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.

Explore the wonders of different shades of colours. It is purely lovely.

After visiting these two places (Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's lair on Obersalzberg) you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.

Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

Everyone has their own calling, but not everyone is looking for the phone, or either they missed the call, or just not answered it.

Keep moving, no matter how slow you move, you will definitely arrive at your destination.

He (William Cort) had some desire to be successful, but it did not burn so strongly in him that he was prepared to overcome his character to achieve it.

I hate what you represent."... "Power without conviction." Isana replied, her tone lifeless, matter of fact. "Ambition without conscience. Decent folk suffer at the hands of those like you.

...but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?

Daring a greater life is a divine act.

A task is only difficulty, when we not find the best strategy to get it done.

Ambition is the driving engine behind every great success.

In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy but doesn't really.  Like the white sugar of mental health, there's a short high followed by a crash.  The cultivation of mental rest or surrender is like eating healthy food.  It doesn’t give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.

God holds the right key to every door.

What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible.

Every piece of art has a buyer. Only Time decides when the right buyer will see it.

Whatever you dream of, there will be fulfillment.

With a decision and a defined purpose, you can begin work.

You are capable of much more than you envisage.

Nothing can squelch your fire except turning your back on the thing that fuels it.

I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you.""I'm your husband; it's our money.""Morally, legally, maybe yes, but in here," she put a hand to her head "and here," she lay the flat of her hand over her heart, "it's your money. You earned it or were given it way before you met me.

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.

If you can't get everyone on your side, make sure they're right behind you.

Ambition: it is the last infirmity of noble minds.